When one of China’s Internet users logs on to Google, everything appears normal. But websites without the government’s blessing – including the BBC, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Amnesty International – will not be found. And Chinese citizens won’t know the difference. While other states that censor the Internet do so blatantly, the Chinese operate in a more clandestine manner. Wendy Ginsberg reports for Index on Censorship (08-JULY-05)
When Microsoft agreed in June to kowtow to the Chinese government’s web restrictions, the news was hardly groundbreaking. The software giant joined a handful of high-powered Internet Service Providers – all chomping at the bit to secure a portion of the vast, lucrative Chinese media market – who have agreed to proscribe bloggers from using terms including ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’, ‘freedom’ and ‘oral sex’. Large dividends are a certainty for the companies who enter the country’s cyber-media market, but the costs to the Chinese population are unclear.
‘There are millions of people in the People´s Republic of China who cannot get to a real newsstand and whose mail secret police have license to vet before delivering it. Many crave the sublime privilege of reading news collected by journalists rather than propagandists,’ Harvard profesor Jonathan Zitrain wrote in a paper on China’s Internet filtering. ‘The free news establishment should take it upon itself to meet them halfway or more.’
Though academics and left-wingers touted the Internet as the catalyst to end authoritarianism and expedite democratic transitions around the globe, despots have kept pace in the technological arms race. With each software unveiling meant to transcend information bans, authoritarian regimes counter-attack with savvy, more secure firewalls. It’s not that the Chinese government is fighting against Internet proliferation. In fact, the communist regime has embraced it, offering pages of information about various government agencies on handfuls of websites. Citizens can peruse sites and feel closer and more knowledgeable about government. The state creates a transparent facade for its citizens while remaining safely inside its closed fortress. The website proliferation also allows government to streamline bureaucracies and removes opportunities for graft and dissidence.
When one of China’s Internet users – now more than 90 million strong – logs on to the popular search engine Google.com, everything appears normal. But search results for China-based web surfers are anything but. Websites without the government’s blessing – including the BBC, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Amnesty International – will not be found. And Chinese citizens won’t know the difference. While other states that censor the Internet do so blatantly, the Chinese operate in a more clandestine manner.
There’s no explanation for a website’s disappearance – a screen pops up telling the user the site doesn’t exist or cannot be found. In other cases, government-required filters discover a blocked word on a requested site, and the upload will cease. There’s no government agency with which to lodge complaints; it’s as if removed sites never existed. But each site restriction and word ban has unintended ramifications, including the elimination of words that reinforce national pride and historical narratives.
‘One [such] word [is] pronounced cao, which can, at times, mean fucking; however, it also means operating, handling, exercising or practicing, and there was a famous king/hero/tyrant in about the second century called Cao Cao,’ explained BoingBoing blogger Weizhong Yang in a 2004 posting. ‘Therefore you cannot set certain derivations of that word –for instance Cao Cao and Yang Xiu, which is a famous traditional Chinese drama – as the title of your MSN space.’
To escape the state’s stronghold, many bloggers outside the People´s Republic of China began a campaign to ‘Adopt a Chinese Blog’. According to a press release from Web Host Industry Review, the programme links bloggers living in states with less stringent censorship regulations to more vulnerable China-based bloggers and uploads the Chinese content on to their server, placing it out of the Chinese government’s legal reach.
China’s internal Internet control, however, is growing tighter and more stealthy. According to government officials, a hiring spree begun in June 2005 aims to find 4,000 college-educated men and women to skulk the web and erase ‘unhealthy information’ and safeguard ‘the operating environment of all websites’. The employees will disperse across Beijing’s 300 cyber cafes and stakeout the country’s 3,000 ISPs to ensure users aren’t viewing pornography or distributing false information. The government claims the move will prevent citizens from falling victim to Internet scams and identity theft. Additionally, the government is ensuring that all China-based websites and Internet cafes register with the government, shutting down those that refuse to register with proper government authorities.
Reporters Without Borders fears Microsoft’s recent kowtow to the Chinese regime aids the government’s invasion of privacy.‘The lack of ethics on the part of these companies is extremely worrying,’ the organisation said of companies like Microsoft and Google in a press release. ‘Their management frequently justifies collaboration with Chinese censorship by saying that all they are doing is obeying local legislation. Does that mean that if the authorities asked Microsoft to provide information about Chinese cyber dissidents using its services it would agree to do so on the basis that it is “legal”?’
the People´s Republic of China is not the only country that requires search engines and ISPs to filter out bits of information. France and Germany, where Nazi propaganda and paraphernalia are banned, rely on the software experts to sift out prohibited information. The distinction between the People´s Republic of China and the rest is the rapacity of censorship and the victims’ lack of awareness.
‘In the short run, China´s filtering remains error-prone and imprecise, so analysts have plenty to criticize,’ the People´s Republic of China Internet expert and Harvard PhD. candidate Ben Edelman wrote in a 2003 op-ed column in the South the People´s Republic of China Morning Post. ‘But in the long run, those who seek to censor online content hold the most important cards: not only can they secretly monitor users´ behaviour, they can search for circumvention systems and implement filtering that daily becomes more sophisticated, threatening and punitive.’
