Culture through response to unrest
So you may have heard about the protests going on in Northwest China right now. I'm not sure how much publicity it's getting in the States, but people are talking about it here and seeing it all unfold from here is interesting.
We woke up Monday morning and saw a couple of headlines on the news sites about unrest in Xinjiang, which is north of Tibet. It's an area with a majority population of Chinese Muslims, called Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs). You might remember Uighurs being in the news a couple of weeks ago when several were released from Guantanamo Bay and sent to Bermuda and Palau against China's wishes.
Well, the initial reports were that three or so people were killed in rioting on Sunday and the impression we had around lunchtime was that Chinese security forces had pretty much gotten things under control. Then someone turned on CNN International after lunch, and it was showing images of overturned police cars and fires in the street. The number of deaths rocketed from three to 140 or so, and these numbers were coming from Xinhua, China's state-run news agency.
A group of us all joined around the TV to see what was happening - I get the feeling domestic civil unrest is very intriguing to people here - and one of the employees says, "Now they're going to lock down Xinjiang." He was right. They imposed a curfew and sent in extra security. The restaurants closed early and the government limited communication.
Communication control started Monday when I couldn't get on Twitter at work. It's common for sites like Twitter and YouTube to get blocked - they were blocked in the days surrounding the Tiananmen Square anniversary too - but we get "special" Internet access at the office, which allows us to access certain sites other Chinese Internet users can't. We get YouTube. We get Wikipedia. We can search for Falun Gong on Google. I can access my blog from my office computer. These are all things that are blocked on our Internet connection at home.
Interestingly, I can still post this blog from work today. I just went to YouTube and looked up the Xinjiang stuff and watched videos of it. I just googled Falun Gong - no problem. But still no Twitter, and in the latest development, no Facebook. They took that one down Tuesday night at about 7:00 China time. That's a pretty big step and it means they're getting serious. They really seem to be going out of their way to not only end the protests, but to prevent people from even talking about them.
One of our duties here, aside from doing stories about hamburgers, is to polish the English on stories done by Chinese reporters and translated by folks in our office. You should see the stuff coming across our desks today (Wednesday). I'll try to keep my opinion about the situation to myself here, but the stories I polished yesterday and today have been really anti-protest and far from objective. The shutting down of a lot of these social media sites, which have proven pretty effective in proliferating information about events in Iran, looks to be China's way of making sure that kind of information is the only kind of information available.
We woke up Monday morning and saw a couple of headlines on the news sites about unrest in Xinjiang, which is north of Tibet. It's an area with a majority population of Chinese Muslims, called Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs). You might remember Uighurs being in the news a couple of weeks ago when several were released from Guantanamo Bay and sent to Bermuda and Palau against China's wishes.
Well, the initial reports were that three or so people were killed in rioting on Sunday and the impression we had around lunchtime was that Chinese security forces had pretty much gotten things under control. Then someone turned on CNN International after lunch, and it was showing images of overturned police cars and fires in the street. The number of deaths rocketed from three to 140 or so, and these numbers were coming from Xinhua, China's state-run news agency.
A group of us all joined around the TV to see what was happening - I get the feeling domestic civil unrest is very intriguing to people here - and one of the employees says, "Now they're going to lock down Xinjiang." He was right. They imposed a curfew and sent in extra security. The restaurants closed early and the government limited communication.
Communication control started Monday when I couldn't get on Twitter at work. It's common for sites like Twitter and YouTube to get blocked - they were blocked in the days surrounding the Tiananmen Square anniversary too - but we get "special" Internet access at the office, which allows us to access certain sites other Chinese Internet users can't. We get YouTube. We get Wikipedia. We can search for Falun Gong on Google. I can access my blog from my office computer. These are all things that are blocked on our Internet connection at home.
Interestingly, I can still post this blog from work today. I just went to YouTube and looked up the Xinjiang stuff and watched videos of it. I just googled Falun Gong - no problem. But still no Twitter, and in the latest development, no Facebook. They took that one down Tuesday night at about 7:00 China time. That's a pretty big step and it means they're getting serious. They really seem to be going out of their way to not only end the protests, but to prevent people from even talking about them.
One of our duties here, aside from doing stories about hamburgers, is to polish the English on stories done by Chinese reporters and translated by folks in our office. You should see the stuff coming across our desks today (Wednesday). I'll try to keep my opinion about the situation to myself here, but the stories I polished yesterday and today have been really anti-protest and far from objective. The shutting down of a lot of these social media sites, which have proven pretty effective in proliferating information about events in Iran, looks to be China's way of making sure that kind of information is the only kind of information available.
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