Censorship in China: Patriot Act

As I was scrolling through Netflix looking for something to watch, I stumbled upon the show “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.” This show is very reminiscent of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” or “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” I decided to take a look at the episodes to see if there was anything interesting, and, lo and behold, there was an episode about Censorship in China. I originally decided to watch it because I knew it would be great material for a blog post, but I found myself very engaged an interested with the material, and even learning new things. One of the things that I found most interesting was how far-reaching censorship is in China. I knew that their internet was censored, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. Most websites that we use on a day-to-day basis are unreachable, and the Chinese Government has even figured out ways to scrub certain messages from the internet altogether. For example, the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 are entirely gone from Chinese internet, and are not even taught about in high school. In the show, Minhaj shows a clip of two millennial-aged Chinese people being asked if they learn about Tiananmen Square, and they say that it is not mentioned. This shocked me, because the Tiananmen Square protests are something that I learned about in high school, and it didn’t even happen in my country. Minhaj makes the comparison/joke that someone in China not learning about Tiananmen Square is like someone in America not learning about 9/11. I was also surprised at how little the people of China seem to mind the constant monitoring. Many common sites that are banned in China, like Facebook or Twitter have Chinese alternatives that make life with censorship more tolerable. Many citizens to not mind the constant monitoring because of these kinds of websites. This was especially shocking to me, because of the outrage when it was found out in America that the NSA was monitoring internet activity. Though now constant monitoring has become a sort of joke, with memes and tweets about having a ‘assigned FBI agent’ that reads everything you post, I know that if this was a reality in America, it would be a big deal to the citizens.