In other words, I have spent most of my life living in a mass-censored country
Although most associate China with dumplings and the Great Wall, I mostly know China as my long-term home. I was born and grew up in the city of Shanghai, China, spending most of those years at Shanghai Community International School (SCIS). In other words, I have spent most of my life living in a mass-censored country.
In all my time in China, I have never directly learned of what I now know to be called the ‘Great Firewall of China”. It prevents “citizens of mainland China from accessing the free and open internet” (Crawford). For me and my international school peers, connecting to a VPN was second nature. However, after moving I have come to realize the true extent of how censorship affected and still affects my life even now. SCIS shaped my childhood as much as my local culture. Growing up I followed the IB’s Primary Years and Middle Years programs, and the school did its best to foster an international environment in a country with rampant propaganda and censorship of free speech. We tried our best to oppose censorship and keep up with global events. However, for us, practically everything we used required VPN. We lived different lives than at ISB, we didn’t use programs like Google Classroom or Gmail, instead embracing Microsoft’s Office 365, and Outlook. Similar cases applied to other applications which are banned in Chinese App Stores.
Censorship and other causes created a childhood without social media giants like Instagram, Spotify, Twitter, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Tumblr, and even Tiktok, which is owned by a Chinese company. As a child, I couldn’t use Google products, access VPN on my phone, connect to Steam, or really interact on a personal level with anyone internationally. I unwittingly lived in a bubble, experiencing a closed-off life but never truly realizing it. The only international news I saw came through class research. Censorship and propaganda had accomplished their goal without my having realized it. Looking back on it now, I had thought that censorship hadn’t affected my life, that mine was no different from a kid living in the States. Yet I now realize it had shaped my life.
I was brought to this sudden and uncomfortable realization when I had left my bubble and moved to Bangkok. Suddenly, the world was so much bigger, so peculiar and strange, so vast and full of possibilities that I felt overwhelmed. Everywhere I went there was a new social media platform I had to add, another platform to use and to gain followers. I had lost the comfort of the norm. Where I had once used apps like WeChat and QQMusic, I was thrust out of that world and into the ones of Instagram, Snapchat, Line, and Spotify. These sudden changes made me very distressed. For someone who didn’t grow up surrounded by so much social media, a sudden influx of it in my life changed me. Where I used to text my friends only on one app, I suddenly had four, each with different options, people, and followers. I wondered why people had considered this the norm.
In addition, I also now had so much access to news everywhere, The New York Times, and the Guardian were only convenient clicks away. I hadn’t the faintest clue where to start. Drowning in all this once unavailable information, I felt lost. A plethora of articles was available everywhere and given so freely, this was a concept so foreign to me. I was Gen-Z, the generation that grew up with technology, yet suddenly something that had once been so familiar had never been so strange.
I couldn’t fathom a world where you were constantly bombarded with information, left, right, and center. Censorship had cut me out of a world I always thought I was part of, but I still realize that my prolonged ignorance of technology would’ve hindered my growth as a person and learner. A list of events that highlight that fact includes the Tiananmen massacre, the Hong-Kong protests, and the Russian-Ukrainian war. While living in China due to censorship, it became harder for me to access the same information, or be offered the same perspective when it came to sensitive current events such as these. Events that reflected poorly on the government also felt taboo, like acts of political defiance spoken warily about. Moving provided clearer perspectives on events. I am now subscribed to CNN’s “Meanwhile in China” updating me on the inner workings of China, politics and major events. I can see everything more clearly now. And I actually feel safe about it, whereas I once might’ve only heard a whisper or be wary of it. Just like the Chinese Protests, I don’t think I ever would’ve heard about the arrested citizens and females.
As I previously mentioned, there’s another side of China, one I never experienced fully. The working/middle class of China, unlike me, weren't able to fully access the internet, living a life surrounded by propaganda and information vulnerable to censorship. Although I can't fully reflect their perspective, I can share my first hand experience on how propaganda and censorship affected lives. Nearing my departure from China, I had made the trip to my Mother’s hometown. Starkly different from an international city like Shanghai, it was pretty isolated, where VPN probably wasn’t at the forefront of everyone’s mind. There, when the conversation about Covid-19 was broached, I found out that we had conflicting ideas regarding the origins of Covid. According to my relatives who only had access to Chinese government information, the virus had originally come from a lab leak in the United States. While I had believed that propaganda only lived in the dystopian novels I read in English, it wasn’t until then that I learned how much it impacted my home country at the time. Essentially, I realized how lucky I was to live in a space, where the only person who dictated my information was myself. I can choose to read news, I can choose to educate myself about events, I could choose my own perspective and belief. It was freedom that I took for granted.
Overall, living in a closed-off environment where one chooses to or is forced to be isolated is in short a negative experience, one I am glad I broke free from. While you can feel harassed by all the data and numbers, one can experience so much more with freedom. It may be overwhelming at first, but it is so much more rewarding. Ultimately, to enhance our learning and improve as people, we should try to surround ourselves with diverse information and perspectives. But also learn to maintain a balance between technology and ourselves.