Comparing regimes of censorship: North Korea and China

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In South Korea, around about the time of writing, free speech activists are preparing to launch over 10,000 copies of Seth Rogen’s The Interview using large balloons. No doubt Kim Jong-un will have prepared his military to immediately seize any copies that touch North Korean soil, and imprison anyone who dares watch the film. Rogen and Franco’s creation, which depicts the North Korean leader as a man who (spoiler alert) soils himself on live TV and sings Katy Perry when he thinks no-one is watching, is something that the chubby dictator wouldn’t want his citizens seeing.

Preventing the distribution of the scathing depiction of Kim Jong-un is not the only example of government censorship in the far Eastern hermit kingdom. North Korea allows no World Wide Web for its citizens. As an alternative, it provides the Kwangmyong – an intranet rife with state propaganda – a social network, its own type of email service and its domestic news service. The state also has twelve newspapers which are sold in Pyongyang, the most notable being Korean People’s Army Daily (Joson Imingun), Democratic Korea, (Minju Choson), and The Pyongyang Times. All are under strict rules to not contain criticism of the government, its leader or North Korea itself.

A notable claim of The Pyongyang Times is that American soldiers have AIDS, and were deliberately stationed in South Korea to infect the population. The newspaper bizarrely declared that half of South Korea is unemployed, 58% have tuberculosis and criticised the decision to allow Seoul to host the 1988 Olympics – claiming tourists and sportsmen “would meet death, infected with AIDS.”

Every letter sent in North Korea is read by a member of the government’s State Security Department to “ensure the loyalty” of those who write and send the letters. Now, it doesn’t take any detective abilities reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes to deduce what happens to those who ‘express disloyalty,’ with the official punishment being ‘re-=education.’ ‘Re-education’ involves the sentencing of an offender to be imprisoned in a ‘Re-education Camp.’

China doesn’t have censorship to the extent of North Korea, but the comparison I draw is between their similar ideological motivations. North Korea shows a determination to stray away from Western ideals by creating a rigidly Stalinist state. The nationalisation of almost all industries allows for complete state control. With every media outlet sourcing its information from the Korean Central News Agency, the state controlled organisation, the government is able to control the transmission of information completely – often promoting the personality cult of the Kim family and the Workers’ Party of Korea.

China uses a similar regime of media censorship to promote an ideology of its own. During the 2008 Olympics, Chinese broadcasters were ordered to delay all streams of footage of the Olympic games by 10 seconds, in order to give time for censors to block out any pro-Tibetan freedom protests, 1989 Tiananmen Square references or any criticism of the Beijing Olympics itself.

Part of the inspiration for this article originated from speaking to a Chinese-born classmate of mine, who moved to England aged eleven. While bored in a GCSE Biology class, we got talking on the subject of Chairman Mao and – to my surprise – my friend could not find a bad thing to say about him. He had never heard of Mao’s responsibility for the Great Chinese Famine, and on the subject of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, he completely denied its occurrence. He of course was not to blame – he was not ignorant of the events in any way, he had just never been exposed to the evidence of the events. After quick Google, we showed him pictures and reports of the massacre and the reports of government censorship. I went and conducted my own research into the censorship of the event, and it turns out that the Chinese government redirect searches of June 4th or Tiananmen Square, blocking transmission of the events which are inconsistent with the government’s own account. To remove physical evidence, blood stained pavement slabs were replaced, so it is easy to see why a sixteen year old Chinese teenager would be adamant that the atrocities of Tiananmen Square didn’t exist.

The comparison to be drawn between both regimes of censorship is firstly in the motivation behind the blocking of certain messages’ transmission. Both regimes block any criticism of their activities. This occurs to a greater extent in North Korea – who block any criticism of the Workers’ Party of Korea – than in China, criticism is blocked of regime activities in certain cases, for example the TV censorship of Beijing Olympics criticism. In the wake of China’s 2008 milk scandal, Southern Weekend’s reporter Fu Jianfeng claimed his investigative report into the political corruption involved in the case. This was to protect the government’s reputation and counteract any sort of negative portrayal of the state, not a promotion of the cult personalities of the current state like that of Chairman Mao or Kim Jong-un.

The similarities between the Intranet of North Korea and China’s internet service are becoming more and more prominent. As North Korea censors anything that is not sourced from the state, China has become more frivolous in its restriction of ideas. Wikipedia dedicates an article to all blacklisted words in Chinese search engines – the most notable of which include ‘democracy,’ ‘anti-communist,’ and ‘human rights.’ A state which claims to be democratic is currently restricting the exploration of such a concept, and with this in place it’s in fact hard to achieve. Both regimes also have their own social network – North Korea filtering any anti-state content and China banning discussion of certain topics on the site. A notable censor among Chinese social networks is Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, notorious for his protesting against the state.

There is a range of similarities between the regimes of censorship. Firstly – the reasons behind it – to promote the power of the state and to portray them as an omniscient Big Brother-esque authority. Secondly, to portray their own country as without flaw in certain cases, and to portray to the rest of the world a cooperative relationship between the state and its citizens. Although it appears that North Korea is an extremity of censorship that China emulates to a lesser extent, even Chinese practice appears dangerously reminiscent of Kim Jong-un’s regime. The global community should remain vigilant.

Words by Chris Paschali

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