CENSORED

in China

 

 

You always hear about censorship in China, but you can never really understand what it means until you live there. I lived in Hong Kong for years and never noticed anything. My dad, who works in Shenzhen (a “special economic zone” just within the border of China – yes you have to pass immigration to go from Hong Kong to “real” China) would occasionally mention that a news story on TV was censored, but I never really got what he meant. However, for the past few weeks I’ve been working with him and living in Shenzhen during the week, returning to Hong Kong on the weekends. Suddenly I understand the phenomenon of censorship.

 

            Yesterday evening after work, I was watching the English news on a TV station broadcast from Hong Kong. The reporter started a new story with “Around the world, celebrations were held to mark Human Rights Day. In Beijing –” Suddenly the program cut to an infomercial with a beaming housewife demonstrating the use of a fancy rice cooker in Mandarin. I stared blankly for a minute before I realized what happened – we had just been CENSORED! I started laughing hysterically as I witnessed my first example of real Chinese censorship. In the middle of the next commercial they cut back into the news, mid-sports report.

 

            Yes, they really do pay people to sit in a tower somewhere in the city and manually censor television. Somewhere out there, looking over us – or perhaps looking up at us from a basement, who knows – a guy is sitting in a dark room, watching your TV, hand poised over the red button to censor seditious or creative broadcasting. All the stations that come in from Hong Kong are under heavy monitoring. Whenever the commercial break starts, they quickly switch it to their own government-approved string of commercials (oddly enough, they are all Hong Kong public service announcements from three years ago). Then they cut back in when the show starts again, always an infuriating two seconds into the show.

 

            About half of the internet is blocked. But not the things you think – I can find dozens of articles criticizing the Chinese government, but random websites for travel magazines or English learning materials are inaccessible. It’s frustrating since I am here teaching English, and I can’t access half of the websites I usually use for worksheets or listening samples. And my own blog is censored – not because it contains blasphemous material, simply because it’s on some list that’s automatically blocked. It seems like every new website created goes into a huge processing list, waiting to be checked by a massive machine or a really bored public servant. Small websites must spend years waiting for approval, if they ever get it at all. I would be interested to find out the method behind the seeming madness of the web-blocking. For now I can only imagine something out of a Kafka novel.

 

For me the censorship is merely annoying and sometimes amusing. I just have to wait until the weekend when I can access it from Hong Kong. (I do all my blog updates here.) But for Chinese citizens, for whom it is very difficult to leave the country, the concept of uncensored news and internet must be as unimaginable as censorship was to me before I saw it with my own eyes.

HK style

Everyone has style in Hong Kong. It’s rare to see someone not looking smart and fashionable – except for construction workers and old people… But even the elderly have a style. The older Chinese women are always dressed in these hideous floral-patterned silk blouses that seem to have been salvaged from the ‘80’s, perhaps found in a dusty corner of a flea market. Yet they are worn by every old lady in the city, so they must still be manufactured at some factory in China. Then there’s the Hong Kong business uniform – suit, tie, shoes, briefcase and Blackberry, always striding down the street with somewhere important to be. Chinese businessmen visiting from the mainland can be identified by their polo shirts and a slight leering swagger, which I’m not sure the meaning of, perhaps it’s an unconscious assertion that “I have money and power.” Then there are the peacocks of the Hong Kong flock, the young Westernised Chinese and expat teens, clad to the teeth in designer gear – heels, skirt, shirt, jacket, sunglasses, purse and cellphone all bearing the mark of a luxury brand name (but only the pros can tell which are real and which are fake). On the slightly edgier side of this are the young Chinese who sport a more Asian style, flaunting the complicated mismatched fashion of Hong Kong locals – big shirts covered in streamers, chains, or giant felt flowers, pushing the boundaries of fashion with what is undoubtedly a very difficult outfit to put on in the morning. Whenever I browse the shops of local designers in Causeway Bay or Tsim Sha Tsui, I always end up embarrassingly trying on outfits upside-down or backwards. I almost never buy because I find myself worrying that one of the offshoots from my dress will get caught in an escalator (that actually happened to me once). Sometimes odd but never boring, the Hong Konger’s fashion sense makes it an always entertaining city for people-watching and trend-spotting.

Hong Kong vs Thailand

Now that I’ve lived in two Asian cities, possibly the two most opposite cities in Asia, I keep being amazed at the huge differences between them. Here are some examples…

 

Hong Kong                             vs.                        Chiang Mai

 

PROS:

            really nice nightclubs                                                  really nice people

            any kind of food you want                                         lots of cheap Thai food

            cheap wine                                                                  cheap SangSom

            beautiful mountains                                                    beautiful mountains

            beautiful harbour                                                         beautiful countryside

            great fashion sense                                                      no fashion sense

            lots of stuff to do                                                        really relaxed attitude

            good public transport                                                  motorbike!

            good newspapers                                                        good soap operas

            entertaining politicians                                                entertaining politicians

            lots of rules which aren’t followed                             no rules about anything

           

CONS:

            disgruntled old expats                                                 disgruntled old farangs

            really hectic big-city lifestyle                                      boring small-town lifestyle

            expensive things                                                          low-quality things

 

So, you can see, some things are the same after all. The winner? Undecided…

Returning to Hong Kong

Hong Kong is unlike any city I’ve ever experienced. It lives, it breathes, it has a vitality that energises everything and everyone in it – from the sleepiest remote village in Lantau Island to the fastest, loudest fashion party in central. There is something dark and desperate underneath the surface, as if an epic battle were being fought. Man and nature are eternally fighting for space in its dramatic terrain; East and West and rich and poor struggle to live side by side in its disparate society; while tradition and modernism battle for its cultural soul. The pace of the city is sometimes overwhelmingly fast, other times astonishingly tranquil. The suit-clad businessman speeds down the sidewalk, cell phone attached to his ear like a bionic extension of his ear canal; while an ancient woman pushes a cart at a turtle’s pace in the opposite direction, hunched over as if withered by age and exhaustion, oblivious of anything around her. Everyone in the city walks to their own beat, creating a multitude of competing rhythms which explode in a cacophony of life. It is a land of violent contrasts, which somehow come together like abstract art to create a beautiful, if incomprehensible picture. Most cities are described as melting pots, where all the elements meld together into a homogenous soup; Hong Kong is more like oil and vinegar. When you pour balsamic vinegar into a cup of olive oil, they remain separate and cling to themselves. If you whisk them together, small black bubbles mingle through the oil, mixed but still struggling to remain intact – this is Hong Kong.