Raging against rising Internet repression

Unsurprisingly, China featured prominently in the sessions. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN journalist and now academic in Hong Kong, stressed that debate had to progress past who is more "brainwashed," Western or Chinese audiences. One of the key translators of Chinese blog posts for Global Voices, John Kennedy, challenged his audience by asking whether the growing Western anger against the Chinese people was justified. Was nationalism as great an influence as claimed? Was self-determination for Tibet so unacceptable in the motherland? Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions?

Despite these valid questions, one of China's leading dissidents, Isaac Mao, wished that the Chinese mob mentality online on issues of national importance wasn't so strong. He stressed that although the concept of freedom of speech is paramount in the West, many other societies place greater emphasis on the rule of law and fighting corruption.

Mao, who launched Digital Nomads to host hundreds of independent blogs away from prying authoritarian rule, feared citizens in prosperous, Western citizens rarely understood the "crimes of omission" in their own societies. "They don't get why the non-Western world wants to talk about issues that the Western largely ignores," Mao said, "such as poverty and environmental degradation". A major theme of the event was highlighted. Too few bloggers in the West were bridging the information gap between different societies and preferred to preach rather than listen.

The role of blogs in China is more than simply reacting to perceived Western slights. Instead, many netizens may not be calling for the dissolution of the Communist Party or planning a revolution, but they're been given far more freedoms today than five years ago.

Mirroring what I found during my research in China last year, very few Chinese bloggers appear upset with the excessive filtering (though some are unaware what they're missing out on). This doesn't mean, however, that the apparent blocking of parts of Facebook isn't annoying for many users or the creeping Olympic crackdown.

It was encouraging to hear from IT insiders that many employees of companies such as Google and Yahoo feel distinctly uncomfortable with the role their companies play in a country such as China and regularly leak material about their actions anonymously and develop tools to allow an e-mail program such as Gmail to be used securely, away from the prying eyes of censorious regimes.

The Budapest conference showed yet again that the mainstream media remains woefully under-prepared and unwilling to cover vast swathes of the world. Blogging and citizen journalism therefore provides an essential alternative to the daily obsession in much of our media with re-printing government and corporate spin as news.