Dodson Ch.1

Before reading the book, I knew that China censored their Internet, but I was always confused on how. I wasn’t sure if they had special Internet police who surfed the web looking for illegal postings, or if they trafficked everything through their system and determined what was okay or not. So, in this chapter, I learned that they use filters to filter out anything that they already deem conspiracy against the government and monitor everything else. I was surprised that they used something so simple as filters because Chinese citizens could still maneuver their information out as long as they were within the filter’s boundaries. This ended up being the case with the Grass-Mud Horse and the Green Dam Girl incidents as people used “clean” words to symbolize their meanings.

I can definitely understand the government’s concern on blocking pornography. If there was anything viable to censor, it would be pornographic materials so that they youth are not innocently subjected to stumbling across such material online. However, I do believe that this was a cover-up to begin censorship so that they could ultimately censor everything else.

My initial reaction to Dodson’s technique is that it’s not very appealing to the reader. I understand why he includes all of the factual information when he does, but at times it seems way too dry. The only aspect that kept my eyes from glazing over was when he included detailed incidents that happened: like the incident when the older man harassed a young girl (p. 4) and his meeting with Lu Xiaobo (p.14). Otherwise, his researched seemed to almost overwhelm me.