FIREWALL Internet Cafe Gives Glimpse of Repressive Chinese Censorship
Students in the lounge of Fusco Hall got a glimpse of the repressive censorship felt in China on Wednesday night.
Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Assistant Professor of Digital Media, recreated her “FIREWALL Internet Cafe” art installation in pop-up form at Marist. The exhibit’s mission is to draw attention to the lack of freedom Chinese web-surfers endure.
FIREWALL grants visitors the opportunity to search for content through Google images and Baidu, the most prominent search engine in China, side by side. A chrome plugin allows the language entered in the search bar to be translated directly into Chinese. The juxtaposition of the results one would expect with censored Baidu findings is jarring.
“Art actually has the power to intimidate authority,” Lee said.
Lee started the project after taking a group of artists from America to Beijing on an artist residency. After a few years of raising money and developing the technology, the exhibit premiered near Chinatown of New York City in 2016. Since then, it has been shown in Michigan, Norway, Austria, and recently Hong Kong.
“Art actually has the power to intimidate authority,”
Lee and her team faced pressure from Chinese officials following the opening of FIREWALL. A human rights lawyer who won two cases against the Chinese government for malpractice over the single-child policy was set to speak at a panel Lee was organizing.
The panel was focused on how feminists in China were able to use technology as a form of activism. Lee knew she had to be careful in involving this particular lawyer, as she found out about her work through Amnesty International, but she “never thought [this] project would be the tipping point.”
Members of the Chinese government forced the lawyer to refrain from participating in the panel by threatening her employer. Lee had removed any evidence of this participation from the internet and reached out to those in China that had posted about the event on social media to remove their posts.
“Authorities, especially authoritarian governments are actively trying to censor [art]. Our project, which was about censorship, is actually actively being censored,” Lee said.
Lee presented the exhibit at Marist in collaboration with a lecture from Buzzfeed International Correspondent Megha Rajagopalan. The two met at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2017 and connected over their shared interests in internet freedom and curtailing government oppression.
Rajagopalan worked as a journalist in China for six years, and won the Human Rights Press Award in 2018 after shedding light on an internment camp for Uighur Muslims.
Rajagopalan found that people were being sent to these camps in the far western region of China for seemingly minor offenses, such as having too many foreign phone numbers or banned apps like WhatsApp on their phones. Inside, innocent people were beaten, sexually abused, and subjected to 24-hour surveillance.
Rajagopalan currently covers threats to mass surveillance in the Middle East, at the intersection of human rights and technology.
“Surveillance and our privacy in digital spaces is something that all of us think a lot about, whether it relates to issues around social media and advertising companies to government surveillance,” Rajagopalan said. “I'm hoping to sort of shed some light on how those issues impact not just Americans, but people who live in different parts of World.”
Marist students were able to become a part of this project from their own campus. If anyone missed the event, they can access an audio recording of the lecture from the library’s archive and can interact with FIREWALL at https://firewallcafe.com/. The lecture was presented through Marist’s Strategic Initiative Funding (SPPAC).
Cover photo: By Lauren Vincenzi ‘20, Marist College