From AFP, an interesting story about veteran journalist Peter Arnett teaching for a semester at Shantou University in Guangdong. Arnett says he found the environment much more open than he expected:
But while the Chinese government appears to be tightening its already formidable control over all forms of information, Arnett says he has found none of the expected limitations on what he can say in his classes during a four-month stint as visiting lecturer at the university’s Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication.
“I thought there would be real limitations in what we would be able to talk about but that is not the case,” he told AFP in a recent interview.
“In other places I have been I have encountered a sense of pessimism but I don’t get that sense here. I’m privileged to be giving young people some of my insights.”
Arnett’s quotes bring to mind something Rebecca Mackinnon told me in an interview last week. MacKinnon, a former Beijing bureau chief for CNN and assistant professor at Hong Kong University’s journalism school, discussed the differences between how censorship of the Chinese Internet is perceived in China and in the West. While clearly a large amount of control still exists through the Great Firewall and other means, most Chinese Internet users are optimistic about how much more freedom they had online than before. “There’s a sense in the West that the censorship is heavy handed and people are really angry about it,” MacKinnon says. “The reality is people are jubilant about what you can do, because there is so much more than what you could do.”