Fili’s world

Background

The issue of Internet censorship has been on the international Internet agenda for a few years as part of a more general discussion on the topic of media and citizen control on freedom of speech in the People’s Republic of China.

The Internet poses unique challenges for the Chinese Government, due to the extremely high volume of information flow, and therefore requires a complicated mixture of laws, regulations, and enforcement measures – both social and technical. It seems that the main threat for the Chinese government with the Internet is the potential anti-government uprise which has actually sparked a few times in China in regard to national issues especially regarding the issues of corruption and freedom of speech. The ease of organizing a group of people to share the anti-government protest as well as publishing anti-government information has convinced the authorities that a tight control over the Internet should be implemented.

Although the Chinese government officially denies it[i], it is a widely accepted fact that the Internet is being censored through a combination of extremely sophisticated technical projects that monitor the Chinese Internet data-flow as well as a special taskforce – estimated at 30 thousand people – that keeps track of potential hazards for the Chinese government in the Chinese Internet and blocks them. This is achieved through the government control over the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in China, so that all communications within China and to the outside world goes through gateways which are under control.

Golden Shield Project (The Great Firewall of China)

During 1998 the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China (MPS) that’s in charge of the Internet censorship has initiated a complex 800mUS$ project called “Golden Shield”[ii] which was aimed at constructing a communication network and a computer information system that would improve the police’s abilities and control.

The project first started operating during the year of 2003 exhibiting the ability to block sensitive prohibited information by preventing access to various sites holding such information as well as filtering out websites that display a combination of certain keywords in real-time.

The western media covering the Great Firewall is unanimous in believing that despite the restrictions and tight Internet control “the propaganda department appears to be losing the battle for hearts and minds. It is partly because there are so many ways around the restrictions, including the use of proxy servers to reach blocked websites and the use of slang terms to discuss sensitive subjects in chatrooms. It is partly because the volume of information available online is so huge that even an army of internet police can not cover all billion-plus webpages, 111 million users, more than 5m blogs, countless bulletin boards, numerous languages and a vast smorgasbord of images” (The Guardian[iii]). Furthermore, the international Internet community has made countless efforts in order to provide both technical tools and moral support for the Chinese netizens to bypass those regulations, like the anti-Golden Shield (proxy) tools that have been set up to negate the specific advances in Chinese censorship techniques, providing bridging websites, anonymity tools and content encryption. Wikipedia, for example, a site that has been blocked in China most of the time has a special page on “Advice to users using Tor to bypass the Great Firewall”[iv] as well as a few other instruction pages.

With that said, even though I witness and practice simple anti-filtering measures in my China activities (like using Pha Loo Gung and Ta Yi Wan instead of the forbidden words), by talking to my Chinese friends I have come to believe that the Internet censorship is a big success for the Chinese government, at least when it comes to intimidating users from speaking up for what they believe. It matters little if the Chinese government can de-facto filter and block all sensitive information as it matters little if the Israeli police can catch all those who pass the traffic-light when it’s red, but what’s important is that by knowing that there are measures being taken on those issues the common people refrain from acting on them against laws and regulations.

So, it seems that the technical enforcement are meant to serve as a basis for a more influential Chinese Internet self-censorship by the Netizens themselves.

Self-censorship

In fear of the government restrictions on Chinese Internet many companies, website administrators and private people maintain a degree of self-censorship where they refrain from discussing banned subjects and enforce removal and banning of sensitive information within their communities.

It has been covered and criticized world-wide that Google China[v] as well as Yahoo China which claim for promoting the freedom of speech with slogans like “do no evil” are now actively exercising self-censorship within their websites and services, explaining that they are committed to the local laws and regulations. The international Google Search and the Blogger blogging service by Google have been blocked for a long time till late last year, when those understanding were reached.

Businesses in China, whose financial future depends on website uptime, fear their websites being closed by government officials or put on ban-mode in the Chinese Internet Gateways, and so those are practicing tight control over the information being contributed by users to their websites which is more affective than any governmental control possible.

Countering self-censorship - some communities, which are more committed to the freedom of speech, play a mouse-cat game allowing a time-interval before actively taking off information by themselves hoping that during the time it takes for the censorship to get into gear, the information would already be spread through enough people. Censorship could also take many forms and some censorship measures are more revealing than others, such as blacking out keywords that allow the reader to guess what was originally said.

Crackdown

China has serious intensions to continue and tighten enforcement for all the censorship regulations in the Chinese Internet. Recently, China’s president Hu JinTao has made a remark regarding the growing threat of the Chinese Internet and the Chinese government’s intentions to "strengthen administration and development of our country’s Internet culture […] Maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online […] We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."[vi]

China has already performed several major crackdowns on Chinese websites which were allegedly acting against government regulations. For example, during 2004 – a tough year in Internet enforcement - two leading blog-services, BlogBus and Blogcn, have been brought down temporarily due to objectionable content regarding the 1989 China events and the 2003 Chinese handling of the SARS situation[vii]. While the big portal of Sina, Sohu and Netease filtered such information, those two blogging services have failed to keep up with the information flow on the subject. Later on during 2004 a few arrests have been made on account of publishing certain content on Internet forums charging the publishers with subversion[viii].

During 2005 the Chinese crackdown moved into high gear, targeting not only the big websites but also the universities’ BBS communities. This crackdown has been discusses widely in Chinese[ix] as well as international media[x] since the reactions to this crackdown were very fierce with 2 major student demonstrations against the government. The crackdown has been acted upon due to the Communist party’s “ideological education” campaign in universities, and was enforced by telling the universities to practice self-censorship threatening them that they would otherwise be closed down or judged. One of the new demands made by the Chinese government was that all online users on those forums be registered with their real names[xi] and details so that offenders and those publishing sensitive anti-party information be brought to trial. This demand has later been extended to the whole Chinese blogosphere. In order to keep up with the new regulations, the universities BBSes have shut down anonymous out-of-campus access to the forums resulting in extreme student discontent.

ESWN^[xii], a journalist blogger covering Chinese online media, translated some of the official announcements that boards have made to their users, some disguising the new regulations as something technical and others clearly announcing what was going on. For example:

"Dongbei University White Mountain Black Water BBS": In order to promote the healthy development of the White Mountain Black Water BBS and in recognition of the actual situation at our university, we have decided to enhance our account management system.  The details are as follows:
1. All previously approved accounts must be reconfirmed.  All White Mountain Black Water BBS users must register in their true identities before the deadline of April 2.  At that time, the BBS will examine the registration data for all users and delete all those whose identities have not been confirmed.
3. For new accounts, the following rules apply:
(1) You must register with your real name
(2) You must state your real work unit, including your department, major and class year
(3) You must register your real address (your building, your floor and your room number)
(4) You must list your room telephone number, and the account manager will then verify your identity over the telephone before you can be approved
(5) You can only register from an IP address inside the school
(6) Anyone whose registration information is false will be deleted
(7) All previous approved users from outside the school will be restricted to "read-only" privileges as of April 15, 2005

Netizens respond to the crackdown

Although it was covered up very fast, it is said that there was a protest of over a 100 students at Tsinghua University calling for the university to withstand government pressure to which the university had to respond with a commitment to talk to the authorities. A similar demonstration of more than 200 students occurred at the Nanjing University. Criticism of this crackdown expanded to other parts of China with newspapers editorials with titles like “Universities Should Not Build Walls Around the Internet”.

ESWN[xiii] continues on this issue with a translation for some the interesting reactions of the Netizens to the Chinese crackdown. The first translation is from is from a post at InMediaHK[xiv] explaining that the crackdown was just another step in an already very censored surrounding, and the second translation was from the SMTH BBS demonstrating the student extreme frustration right after the crackdown (bold not in original text) :

I have been holding back for so long.  Since the people above want to defeat on us today, I am going to speak these words no matter what the consequences are for me. […]

We are all only small people and poor students.  These days, it is so hard to find a job now and housing is so expensive.  We have received some form of higher education.  We don’t hate socialism.  We are not opposed to peace.  We don’t long for capitalist liberalism.  We don’t support the democratic movement.  We are not sympathetic towards the FLG.  We can discern rumors.  And we may sometimes have impure thoughts when we see the photograph of a pretty woman with big breasts.

I don’t understand how a group of reasonable people in a BBS community, a server that is only a feet tall and several tens of thousands of accounts would pose a grave danger to our great country, our glorious party and the historically illustrious Tsinghua University campus?

Please!  This is the information age!  If people want to know something, you won’t be able to hide it.  If people don’t want to know something, it will be useless for you to force it upon them.  There was no need to impose this Internet blockade again. 

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(This is part 2 of an essay submitted for a course about "modern society in urban China" summarizing my China Netizens online reading throughout the past year. Part 1 introduced the "Chinese Netizens")

[i] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4715044.stm

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China

[iii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1713317,00.html

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_using_Tor_to_bypass_the_Great_Firewall

[v] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1156598,00.html

[vi] http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article-eastasia.asp?parentid=62078

[vii] http://www.chinatechnews.com/2004/03/19/1029-china-pulls-plug-on-internet-blogs/

[viii] http://www.chinatechnews.com/2004/02/17/853-internet-essayist-arrested-in-hubei/

[ix] http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050322_2.htm

[x] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61334-2005Mar23.html

[xi] http://www.danwei.org/internet/fighting_for_the_right_to_post.php

[xii] http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050322_2.htm

[xiii] http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050323_1.htm

[xiv] http://www.inmediahk.net/public/article?item_id=21440&group_id=16