Week 11: Censorship and Historical Memory
Reading Questions
Monday
For
Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall
, read the introduction (pp.
1-20) and pp. 104-112 (on the current censorship of the Chinese internet).
1. The concepts of “friction” and “flooding” is one of the main contributions of
Censored,
along
with the idea that porous censorship is a conscious state strategy.
a) From the Chinese state’s perspective, what are the costs and benefits of a porous approach to
censorship? Does Roberts overstate the extent to which there is a unified, coherent state
strategy?
b)
Are friction and flooding ideas that could be applicable inside democracies? Do you see any
evidence of friction or flooding in the United States?
Wednesday
2. What is Glenn Tiffert’s argument about how digitization destabilizes knowledge? (Note the
reference to 1984
in the title!). Why were certain Chinese academic articles from the 1950s
expunged from the digital record? How does the CCP want this historical period to be
remembered?
3.
The brief excerpt from Masha Gessen’s
The Future is History
is also about historical
remembrance, and how curating a certain vision of history helps build political legitimacy in the
present. How did TV Rain screw up, and how did the government move against them?
Friday
4. It is not every day that you get to read an interview with a Chief Censor! How did Solodin
view his job and his contribution to society? What (if anything) surprised you? How did Solodin
view his job and his contribution to the society? How does Solodin compare to Gerd Wiesler,
the Stasi bureaucrat portrayed in "The Lives of Others?"
5. Why would the Chinse authorities create the world’s largest repository of court decisions,
1
and then start removing selected cases? How do you make sense of this kind of selective
transparency?
1 See
https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/
, which went live on January 1, 2014.
