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【08.07.31 英国 Spiked 北京2008系列 之十】双重标准绝不是自由的朋友
【标题】Double standards are no friend of freedom 双重标准绝不是自由的朋友
【来源】http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5532/
【翻译方式】人工翻译
【翻译】dakelv
【声明】本文翻译版权归Anti-CNN和本人所有，转载请注明译者及出处。
【译注】本文是Spiked的 “2008北京：挑战对中国的污蔑”系列文章之十。 这也是我计划翻译的这个系列的最后一篇文章。
【原文】
Thursday 31 July 2008
Double standards are no friend of freedom
Is the concern over Chinese censorshipdriven by a real desire for liberty, or fury that the Chinese haveblocked the words of Western experts?
Brendan O’Neill
To the uninitiated, it may have seemed that the internet connection wasa bit iffy – working one minute, as you browsed Google, butdisconnected the next. In fact, the blocking out of information on the1989 massacre – as well as websites on human rights, large sections ofWikipedia, and web material on Falun Gong (the fresh-air-and-exercisecult) – is part of what is known as the ‘Great Firewall of China’.
In the late 1990s, the Ministry of Public Security of the People’sRepublic of China spent US$800million on developing the Golden ShieldProject (the official title of the ‘Great Firewall’). It is a vastsystem that uses firewalls and proxy servers at the internet ‘gateway’to block certain content, by preventing IP addresses – those belongingto websites with ‘dangerous’ material – from being routed into China(1). To get around it, I ended up having to email colleagues in London,ask them to find and open the articles on Tiananmen Square I wanted toread, and then copy and paste them into an email and send them over.
As someone who has campaigned for free speech my whole adult life –and who edits an online magazine which believes free speech is the mostimportant freedom of all – I was horrified to see sections of theinternet restricted in this fashion. China needs internet freedom, andit needs it now.
So why do I feel uncomfortable with, possibly even angry about, thecampaign by Western human rights lobbyists to highlight internetcensorship in China in the run-up to the Olympics? Because, like somuch of the Western attitude to China today, the global effort to ‘putpressure’ on the Chinese to ‘live up to their Olympic promises on humanrights’ seems to be underpinned by double standards – and doublestandards are no friend of freedom. Instead they denigrate freedom,turning ‘free speech’ and ‘liberty’ into weapons to be wielded by theapparently pure West against its inferiors in the cruel, exotic andbarbarous East.
China’s pre-Olympics censorship of the Web, and its alleged plan tospy on and monitor foreign reporters and others who visit Beijingduring the Games, has caused a storm of controversy this week. Therewas fury in the leader pages of the Western press when it was revealedthat the website of Amnesty International, including its new reportalleging that the human rights situation has worsened in China duringthe Olympics preparation period, is not accessible from the Main PressCentre for the Games in Beijing.
Amnesty says the unavailability of its site – and ‘a number of othersites’ – is ‘compromising fundamental human rights and betraying theOlympic values’ (2). The shock that the Chinese would dare to blockAmnesty’s site in particular was captured in a Guardiancartoon titled ‘China’s Olympic human rights effort’: it showed agrinning (possibly demented) Chinese official using the Olympic flameto set fire to a document titled ‘Amnesty International Report onChina’ (3).
Meanwhile, an American senator has claimed that the Chinesegovernment is planning to ‘spy on’ reporters in Beijing, by monitoringtheir internet use in hotel rooms and what they write (4). In what hasbeen labelled a ‘global drive’ to force through change in China,Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and vast numbers of commentators arecalling on Western governments, the International Olympic Committee andthe commercial sponsors of the Games to use the opportunity of Beijing2008 to pressurise China over its censorship-and-spying antics.
This raises an immediate, possibly ominous question: why is theresuch far-reaching and furious fuss over China’s Olympics-relatedauthoritarianism when other countries that have used the Olympics as apretext to rein in people’s freedoms have escaped internationalcondemnation largely scot-free? It seems the Chinese are continuallyand explicitly judged by a very different standard to white countrieswithin the Western fold.
Some of the news reports on China’s ‘Olympian authoritarianism’ havesaid that such things would have been ‘unthinkable in Athens’ (5). Whatshort – or possibly selective – memories people have. During the AthensGames of 2004, in the name of protecting Greece and internationalathletes from a potential terrorist attack, the Greek authoritiesinstituted a vast and permanent system of spying and surveillance.
The Greek, in tandem with the ‘Olympics industry’ (6), transformedAthens into what one Greek academic labelled a ‘superpanopticon’ – thatis, an open prison where everyone and almost everything was monitoredby the authorities. The Athens Olympics were turned into a ‘testingground for the latest anti-terrorist superpanoptic technology’, whichinvolved ‘exploiting real and perceived terrorist threats to prescribeextremely high security requirements’ (7).
If the Chinese want to spy on people, they could learn a lot fromthe Greek authorities. In 2004, Athens installed a vast computersurveillance network, consisting of thousands of hidden cameras andmicrophones across the city that could analyse dozens of languages forany hint of ‘terrorist chatter’. Under the advice of the Britishauthorities – who, having installed more than 20 per centof the world’s closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras on our tinyisland over the past 10 years, are the undisputed kings of CCTV – theGreek also introduced hi-tech CCTV cameras on the streets and roadsaround the Olympic village (8).
Greece spent an Olympics-record US$1.5billion on security. More than70,000 security personnel, including 16,000 soldiers, patrolled thecountry’s borders and the perimeter of Athens. American troops assistedGreek troops in a mammoth three-week training exercise codenamed Shieldof Hercules 2004, teaching them how to respond to potential‘catastrophic scenarios’ (there was none, of course). The then USambassador to Greece was pleased with the results of the jointAmerican-EU-Greek clampdown in Athens, arguing: ‘The job here is to putas many locks, sirens and alarms on the house called the Olympics sothat the burglar goes to some other house.’ (9)
Do you remember any angry global campaign against the Greeks for‘betraying Olympic values’ with their locks, sirens, alarms, cameras,microphones, fighter planes and barbed wire? No – because there wasnone.
The message of this disturbing double standard – where Greece was assistedby Western elements in its Olympian authoritarianism while China iscondemned by Western elements for its Olympian authoritarianism – seemsclear: it is okay for ‘us’ to sacrifice liberty in the name ofsecurity, but not ‘them’. Our denigration of rights is somehow moreacceptable – more legitimate, well-meaning, ‘evidence-based’ perhaps –than theirs. Inexorably, unwittingly, the judgement of China by anentirely different standard to Western countries is rehabilitating theold, foul idea that Easterners are in some way more naturally wickedand malicious than we Westerners: a ‘cruel race’, as Bridget Jones’ mumreferred to them.
Likewise, China does not have a monopoly on internet censorship.Across the globe, nervous and isolated elites have reacted to the riseof the internet – this open, worldwide, border-shattering means ofcommunication – with angst and authoritarianism.
In Britain and America, under the ostensible guise of ‘protectingchildren from harm’ – that is, protecting kids while they are using theinternet and also removing child porn from the internet – semi-officialbodies like the Internet Watch Foundation have demanded the removal ofhundreds of websites and webpages. As Marjorie Heins pointed out in herimportant book Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency’, Censorship and the Innocence of Youth,for almost 150 years authoritarian governments have used children as apretext for censorship, as a kind of ‘moral shield’ – and thatcontinues in the relentless effort to regulate the internet today (10).
Often, Western censorship of the internet is more sophisticated thanChinese censorship. Where in China a vast government-funded wallreduces potentially interesting content to blank error pages, in theWest we have the rise of frequently non-state funded filtering systems– ‘intelligent software’ and internet-blocking technology that can beinstalled on computer networks to keep at bay ‘offensive’ content,which can include everything from sexual images to swear words to JamesJoyce’s Ulysses (it has indecent language).
As the pro-freedom campaign group Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued, the spread of filtering systems ‘promotes a normof censorship’. The American Civil Liberties Union – which successfullyoverturned the 1996 Communications Decency Act, America’s own attemptto crudely censor the internet – argues that rating systems andfiltering and blocking technology, often installed outside of theauspices of the state, can pose an even ‘more insidious threat to freespeech’ (11). Today it has been announced that British MPs want YouTubeto vet its content and filter out anything ‘offensive’.
Again, double standards seem to be at play in the debate aboutChina’s internet censorship. Unwittingly perhaps, the obsessive focuson China’s censoriousness gives the impression that the West, beingapparently free and liberal, has the moral authority to lecture theChinese about freedom of speech. It is a bit like entrusting ReggieKray to dictate to Ronnie Kray about the best way to treat businesscompetitors.
This is why I am uncomfortable with the current crusade againstChinese authoritarianism – because double standards denigrate the ideaof freedom rather than making it a reality. The implicit treatment ofChinese authoritarianism as being somehow culturally ingrained, andmore morally offensive than anything done in the West or byWestern governments around the world (in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan),denigrates the humanity and universality of freedom; it turns ‘liberty’into a weapon of realpolitik to be aimed and fired at theChinese by Western politicians, corporations and commentators whothemselves have turned a blind eye – or actively supported – therolling back of rights.
It treats freedom as something that can be delivered to the Chineseon a silver platter by their caring superiors in the West, when in factonly the Chinese masses themselves – with the support of people in theWest who genuinely care for liberty and freedom of speech – can makeChina a free country. It is in the process of demanding freedom andfighting for it that people become free. They cannot be made free by anAmnesty document, a strong-worded condemnation of the Communist Partyof China by President Bush, or by Silvio Berlusconi’s decision to optout of the Olympics opening ceremony. To imagine that the Chinesepeople can be liberated by such actions only flatters the moralpretensions of morally bankrupt Western elites and underestimates thehistory-making potential of the Chinese people themselves.
Reading the coverage of the Chinese censorship-and-spyingcontroversy, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some in the Westare really angry because the Chinese have dared to block access totheir apparently sacred documents. That is why there is such widespreadalarm that Amnesty’s material won’t be accessible from the BeijingMedia Centre, complete with images of ruthless Chinese officialsburning Amnesty documents – as if this is the only or the mostimportant form of censorship enacted by the Chinese regime. This skewedfocus reveals what seems to lie behind the current crusade againstChinese authoritarianism: a desire to preserve and elevate thearguments, even the ‘divine truth’, of elite Western experts overforeign governments.
I want freedom of speech for all the Chinese so that they can openlydiscuss their political and social problems and resolve them; some seemmore interested in defending the freedom of Western NGOs to lecture theChinese about how they must change. The current moral crusade againstChinese authoritarianism may flatter Western activists, but it will notliberate China.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.
(1) Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China, Wikipedia
(2) IOC Caves In To China’s Demands On Internet Censorship, Amnesty International, 30 July 2008
(3) China’s Olympic human rights effort, Guardian, 30 July 2008
(4) Senator: China orders hotels to help spy on Internet users, CNN, 30 July 2008
(5) Olympics reporters find Web censored, Toronto Star, 30 July 2008
(6) Security and Surveillance in the Athens 2004 Olympics, International Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, 220-238 (2007)
(7) Security and Surveillance in the Athens 2004 Olympics, International Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, 220-238 (2007)
(8) Fortress Olympics, by Brendan O’Neill, Rising East, January 2005
(9) Fortress Olympics, by Brendan O’Neill, Rising East, January 2005
(10) Not in front of the children?, by Sandy Starr
(11) Not in front of the children?, by Sandy Starr
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