Message Control

Baotong Gu

All spring, the news followed an ongoing battle overseas: China on one side and Internet giant Google on the other, struggling over censorship and the electronic flow of information.

Each side has had tricks up its sleeve: Google moved its search engine operations to Hong Kong in March, declaring its intention to stop censoring. But China allows its citizens to access Hong Kong sites through only a very few routes, creating impossibly slow browsing speeds.

It all seemed to be a very 21st century kind of crisis, this battle over who would control the Internet. But according to Baotong Gu, associate professor of English, the Chinese have struggled with the implications of information technology for more than 5,000 years.

Gu traces that history in his new book, From Oracle Bones to Computers: The Emergence of Writing Technologies in China, published by Parlor Press.

"The development of writing technologies is really a process of negotiation among different groups of users, including the government," he said.

Written records and printing were, in their time, also subjects of struggle, he added.

Gu writes that the Internet represents a continuation of those battles in a new form. In China, the government was and is heavily involved in building the country's online infrastructure. All of the major online media outlets - just like other Chinese media - are government-controlled.

Still, Internet chat rooms host some of the freest speech in China, according to Gu, and often the talk is on political reform.

One of the stranger effects of the computer, Gu noted, was that people could suddenly write much faster than they had before.

"The Chinese typewriter was never popularized so that ordinary people could use it," he explained.

In China, typewriters had thousands of keys and thousands of characters and couldn't be used without special training. But when computers came along, writers could use a much smaller number of keys to create an infinite number of characters.

"The Chinese jumped directly from handwriting to computer typing," he said. "Professional writers, for example, were suddenly producing twice as much."

Another side effect of the online boom is that it's upending one of China's oldest cultural traditions: respect for one's elders.

"The older generation has always been considered more knowledgeable," Gu said. "But young people are adapting to computer technology more quickly, and they are getting more information from the Internet. Now, young people are sometimes considered to know more."