A senior Chinese official has spoken out against his country’s repressive internet censorship measures in a rare show of defiance.
Luo Fuhe, a technology adviser to China’s parliament, said that Communist officials should un-ban some of the thousands of websites currently blocked by the so-called Great Firewall.
Web censorship has become more severe in the years since Xi Jinping became president, with hundreds of news sites blocked, as well as most social networks.
But Luo spoke out against China’s determination to control its people’s internet access over the weekend, saying that academic sites should be removed from the filter.
He said continued censorship “will have a grave impact on our country’s socio-economic development and scientific research”, the South China Morning Post reported.
He cited examples of state filtering software slowing the internet down to an unusable pace.
Pages hosted by the UN could take 20 seconds to load, while sites hosted by foreign universities are so heavily vetted they can take more than half an hour, he warned.
Luo belongs to one of China’s non-Communist political parties, and works for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which advises their parliament.
His criticism is exceptionally outspoken given the commitment of the Communist party, which dominates China’s political culture, to the policy.
Notably, Luo stuck to uncontroversial academic examples and the economic costs of web censorship, rather than focusing on personal freedom.
He left out the social penalty suffered by the Chinese people, unable to access huge chunks of the internet which are freely available in the West.
The repressive outlook earned China the worst score in the world in a recent ranking of government internet policies by the Freedom House watchdog organization.
But is unlikely to be taken on board by leading figures of the Chinese politburo, who are headed in the opposite direction.