Chinese-language Wikipedia presents different view of history By
Howard W. French The New York Times
Just who was Mao
Zedong?
According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the
popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political
leader who founded China's modern Communist state. He was also a man many
saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the
deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese."
Switch to Wikipedia
in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's
reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of
the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in
human history.
In recent weeks, the Chinese government has demonstrated
its hostility toward the emergence of a credible source of reference material
that escapes its control by frequently blocking access to Wikipedia,
whose Chinese version, though still far smaller than its
English-language counterpart, is growing by leaps and bounds.
But on
sensitive questions of China's modern history or on hot-button issues, the
Chinese version diverges so dramatically from its English counterpart that it
sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves.
This
gulf in information and perspective comes across powerfully in the entry on
Mao, which is consistently one of the most frequently searched and edited
topics in the Chinese version, and in the entry on historical watersheds,
like the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution.
Chinese Wikipedia users and critics say that the differences
highlight the resilience here of a system of information control whose
reach goes well beyond simple censorship.
In each of its language
versions, Wikipedia is collaboratively written and edited by online
enthusiasts, and contributors to the Chinese-language site explain the
differences in content by citing the powerful influence of Chinese education,
which often provides a neatly sanitized national perspective on sensitive
aspects of the country's past.
This parochialism is reinforced by the
blocking of foreign Web sites, and by the conformism of the carefully
censored mass media. Alternative viewpoints are sometimes available, but
usually only to a restricted circle of people who have the means and
determination to seek them out.
For some, the Chinese version of
Wikipedia was intended as just such a resource, but its tame approach to
sensitive topics has sparked a fierce debate in the world of online mavens
over its objectivity and thoroughness.
In a recent discussion on the
encyclopedia's Web site about the Mao legacy, a user with the online name
Manchurian Tiger wrote, "If anyone can prove that Mao's political movements
didn't kill so many people, I'm willing to delete the wording that 'millions
of people were killed.'" Rather than contribute to encyclopedias, those who
wish to pay tribute to Mao, he added, should "go to his
mausoleum."
Another user replied angrily: "If you want to release your
emotions, use a bulletin board. Wikipedia is not your toilet." In the end,
the entry on Mao included no death toll from either famine or
political purges.
Indeed, in its present form, the Chinese Wikipedia
introduction to Mao Zedong could hardly be more anodyne: "One of the main
founders and leaders of the Communist Party of China, the People's Liberation
Army and the People's Republic of China," it reads. "He introduced a
series of political movements such as the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution. He had a great influence over 20th-century China and
the world."
On the evidence of entries like this, for the moment, the
fight over editorial direction of Wikipedia in Chinese is being won
by enthusiasts who practice self-censorship.
"Most of the people who
contribute to Wikipedia rarely touch upon political topics," said Yuan
Mingli, a frequent contributor from Shanghai. "They prefer to write about
things like technology. There are other things in life."
Others
denounce compromises on content as a deviation from the original mission of
Wikipedia, which they say is to spread reliable information and to seek
truth. In any case, they add, self- censorship has already proved naïve
because the government still frequently blocks access for most Chinese
Internet users.
"There is a lot of confusion about whether they should
obey the neutral point of view or offer some compromises to the
government," said Isaac Mao, a well-known Chinese blogger and user of
the encyclopedia. "To the local Wikipedians, the first objective is
to make it well-known among Chinese, to get people to understand
the principles of Wikipedia step by step, and not to get the thing
blocked by the government. The government doesn't buy into their
attitude."
After Mao Zedong, few questions are treated as more sacrosanct
in China than the status of Taiwan, which every pupil is taught
is irrevocably part of China. To publicly suggest that Taiwanese have
any historical basis for asserting their independence from China would
be a career-ending offense for anyone in academia or in the media.
The
English-language version of the encyclopedia speaks of a Japanese shipwreck
off Taiwan in 1871, in which 54 crew members were beheaded by Taiwanese
aborigines. Japan demanded compensation from China, only to be told that
Taiwan was not within China's jurisdiction. The Chinese-language entry on
Taiwan, meanwhile, is silent on the jurisdiction question.
Similarly,
the English-language Wikipedia mentions the settlement of Taiwan by
aborigines who are genetically related to Malaysians, about 4,000 years ago.
It also places the first meaningful settlement of the island by Chinese in
the 16th century.
The Chinese version of Wikipedia, though, merely speaks
of cultural affinities with Malaysians and speculates about the
possible exploration of the island by Chinese as far back as the third
century.
A parallel, and purely homegrown, effort at creating an
online encyclopedia in China, Baidu Baike, skirts controversies like
these altogether. Baidu Baike, which is owned by the biggest Internet
search engine company in China, asserts that Taiwan's original
inhabitants "came from mainland China directly or indirectly," and not
from Malaysia.
Similarly, a user who searches for the Tiananmen Square
massacre will find no entry.
As online reference sites grow in
popularity here, Baidu Baike benefits from government efforts to block
Wikipedia, just as the same company's search engine once benefited from
similar blockage of Google.
Baidu Baike, much of whose content appears
to be copied directly from Wikipedia, would not release detailed user
statistics, saying only that it has "several million" users each day. A
spokeswoman for the company, Zhang Yan, said it is guided by the editorial
policy of not "judging the existing national system with
malice."