“Yo, P, tell ‘em what cha life’s like”

Living in China, censorship will be a part of your daily life. Like the clouds keeping out harmful UV rays, you’ll be blessed with some dude deciding what you read when you roll in late to the office each morning. That means no wikipedia, no flickr, no blogspots, sometimes no wordpress, no typepad, no tumblr, SMS hackers*, no IHT, no NYT, no USA Today, and at times, no CNN or YouTube. Basically, all your lifelines to outside information and rational thinking. Your understanding of world events will be limited to headlines because when you click through, the page will not load. Good friends will begin copy/pasting articles into emails and msn chat windows. Books? Forget it. Your friend will ship some in, but they will be held up in customs until you provide a complete translation of them all. That, or some of those red bills.

If it weren’t bad enough that you won’t be able to access info, you’re gonna be victim of rampant dissemination of propaganda, not only from your peers but via various forms of media. During the riots in Lhasa or at other times of social unrest, that will include text messages and msn spams with warnings of Tibetans carrying bombs and machetes (ok, this will be true and two innocent bystanders will get hacked) to nearby big cities. Sometimes the information is so absurd that you’ll just censor yourself. You’ll all but stop watching TV, especially the one English language station, because the assault on common sense is too much to handle. As you understand more and more of the Chinese language, you’ll limit yourself to shows whose characters don’t start every other sentence with, “We Chinese people {insert self-praise here}.” But you’ll still wonder,’with only themselves as an audience, why are they telling themselves who they themselves are?’.

What will all this mean for your life? It means, basically, that you will be incapable of having an intelligent conversation on politics, history, and most social issues. People will say things that are absolutely incorrect but you won’t be able to argue; not because arguing over something that matters is essentially unacceptable (but sometimes it is), but because information asymmetry makes it logically impossible. To fill the void, you will have only a few options - work longer hours and try to make more money or find viceful hobbies like drinking, “soaking” mei meis, and eating unhealthy amounts of street BBQ.

But, while irked, you will be impressed. You will say to yourself, ‘the thing about propaganda is that it works’. You’ll remember Fidel’s quote: “Propaganda is the soul of every struggle” and nod your head in agreement. To control the thoughts of over 1 billion people; to have that many people, more or less, think the same thing. It will be impressive, if not scary.

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*You will have some friends from other Asian countries and they will tell you that the text messages sent back home - sometimes in their native language, sometimes in English - often arrive in altered form. “I love you” might turn to “I hate you” and someone might get called a “fool” instead of a “sweetheart”.