[FACT comments: Censorship may be judged purely by political will, not by volume. Thai citizens are, in fact, in a far more dangerous situation regarding access to information--the Computer-Related Crimes Act criminalises computer users for far more 'crimes' than does China. Thai users can be criminally charged for accessing any illegal content on the Internet. Read the complete report here. RSF's complete China report follows this article. We have also reviewed a second research report on Chinese censorship for comparison, available only in French: http://www.frstrategie.org/barreFRS/publications/rd/RD_20070126.pdf]
A “Journey to the Heart of Internet censorship” on eve of party congress
Reporters Without Borders
In partnership with Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Chinese Internet expert working in IT industry has produced an exclusive study on the key mechanism of the Chinese official system of online censorship, surveillance and propaganda. The author prefers to remain anonymous.
On the eve of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which opens this week in Beijing, Reporters Without Borders and the Chinese Human Rights Defenders call on the government to allow the Chinese to exercise their rights to freedom of press, expression and information. “This system of censorship is unparalleled anywhere in the world and is an insult to the spirit of online freedom,” the two organisations said. “With less than a year to go before the Beijing Olympics, there is an urgent need for the government to stop blocking thousands of websites, censoring online news and imprisoning Internet activists.”
This report shows how the CCP and the government have deployed colossal human and financial resources to obstruct online free expression. Chinese news websites and blogs have been brought under the editorial control of the propaganda apparatus at both the national and local levels.
The use of the Internet keeps growing in China. The country now has more than 160 million Internet users and at least 1.3 million websites. But the Internet’s promise of free expression and information has been nipped in the bud by the Chinese government’s online censorship and surveillance system.
“Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship” explains how this control system functions and identifies its leading actors such the Internet Propaganda Administrative Bureau (an offshoot of the Information Office of the State Council, the executive office of the government), the Bureau of Information and Public Opinion (an offshoot of the party’s Publicity Department, the former Propaganda Department) and the Internet Bureau (another Publicity Department offshoot).
The report also documents how the Beijing Internet Information Administrative Bureau has in practice asserted its daily editorial control over the leading news websites based in the nation’s Capital. It gives many examples of the actual instructions issued by officials in charge of this bureau.
The last part of the report gives the results of a series of tests conducted with the mechanism of control through filtering keywords. These tests clearly show that, though there are still many disparities in the levels of censorship, the authorities have successfully coerced the online media into submission to censor themselves heavily on sensitive subjects.
This report recommends using proxy servers, exploiting the different levels of censorship between provinces or between levels in the administration and using new Internet technologies (blogs, discussion forums, Internet telephony etc.)
RSF’s FACT BOX: China
Population: 1,294,867,000
Internet users: 78,000,000 (2003)
Average charge for 20 hours of connection: 8 euros
DAI*: 0.43
Situation**: very serious
* The DAI (Digital Access Index) has been devised by the International Telecommunications Union to measure the access of a country’s inhabitants to information and communication technology. It ranges from 0 (none at all) to 1 (complete access).
** Assessment of the situation in each country (good, middling, difficult, serious) is based on murders, imprisonment or harassment of cyber-dissidents or journalists, censorship of news sites, existence of independent news sites, existence of independent ISPs and deliberately high connection charges.
Internet Under Surveillance: China
With a total of 61 Internet users in detention at the start of May 2004, China is the world’s biggest prison for cyber-dissidents. It is also the country where the technology for e-mail interception and Internet censorship is most developed. What’s more, the authorities recently decided to tighten the vice and roll back the few gains made by Internet users in recent years.
The Chinese authorities use a clever mix of propaganda, disinformation and repression to stifle online free expression. Initial hopes that the Internet would develop into an unfettered media and help liberalize China have been dashed. What has happened in China has shattered generally accepted ideas. The Internet can indeed become a propaganda media. On its own, it will not suffice to support the emergence of democracy in any significant way. And it can be totally controlled by a government that equips itself to do so.
Indeed, the way the Chinese government has sabotaged online dissent offers a model for dictatorships around the world. Cuba and North Korea stifled online dissent by limiting the Internet’s development. The Chinese government unfortunately proved that the Internet can be developed and sterilized at the same time.
Many Chinese Internet users are very inventive and have the technical know-how to evade Beijing’s censorship. But the reinforcement of filtering measures since the start of 2004 has made it much harder to access independent information. At the same time, exiled dissidents are becoming more active and effective. They help design tools to foil the Chinese firewalls and try to put pressure on the governments in the countries where they live. However, what with the hypocrisy of western governments eager to benefit from China’s growing economic power and the major financial resources being invested by the Chinese authorities in tracking down cyber-dissidents, those who fight for free expression have no easy task.
With nearly 80 million Internet users, China now has more people online than any other country in the world except the United States. The number may seem low compared with the overall population, but it has doubled in 18 months. At this rate, it will be the world’s dominant Internet player in a few years.
China’s burgeoning Internet
China today has nearly 600,000 websites that have been approved by the authorities, a 60 per cent increase over 2002. Internet businesses are also booming. Sina.com, China’s biggest portal, announced turnover of more than 30 million euros for the fourth quarter of 2003, a 197 per cent increase on the same period in 2002. While western Internet firms are struggling to emerge from the crisis, China looks like El Dorado and is the source of envy.
To keep its foothold in this market, Yahoo! agreed to censor the Chinese version of its search engine and to control its discussion forums. So, if you enter “Taiwan independence” into its search engine, you get no results. It you try to post a message on this subject in a discussion forum, it never appears online. The US giant is ready to do anything to conquer the Chinese Internet market and is buying up Chinese companies such as the search engine 3721.com, for which it paid 120 million dollars. With all this money at stake, human rights and freedom of expression are brushed aside.
Beijing tries to clean up its act
The government has continued to crack down, but has also offered the international community some goodwill gestures. “Respect and guarantees for human rights” were incorporated into the Chinese constitution in March 2004. The authorities published a white paper defending its human rights policies the same month. These good intentions were complemented by a few specific, well-publicised moves.
Liu Di, a student who had been held for a year without trial because of messages she posted on the Internet, was finally set free at the end of November 2003. Well known in China and abroad, she had become a symbol of the iniquities of the Chinese judicial system. At the same time, most of the detained cyber-dissidents who had been held without trial for years were finally tried in 2003. They were, it is true, sentenced to prison terms for just exercising their right to free expression, but holding the trials indicated a political will to legalise their status, which could be considered an improvement.
Internet as propaganda tool
The Chinese authorities make effective use of the Internet as a propaganda vehicle. The state news media now have a very powerful online presence. The website of the governmental news agency, www.xinhuanet.com, and the online version of China Daily, www.chinadaily.com.cn, receive millions of visits every day. Their content is entirely controlled by the Communist Party.
In December 2003, foreign minister Li Zhaoxing became the first government official to agree to take part in an online “chat” with Internet users. While it has not yet become common practice, it shows that politicians want to exploit the Internet’s new possibilities as best they can.
The government also uses the Internet to promote its position on sensitive issues. It has, for example, set up many Tibet information websites, such as www.tibetinfo.com.cn and www.tibetology.com.cn, which help to legitimise its control of the region. The English-language versions of these sites highlight living conditions in Tibet and the central government’s respect for human rights. Such sites aim both to mould Chinese public opinion and assuage foreign criticism.
While heavily censoring discussion forums, the regime also knows how to exploit them. For example, they are manipulated in times of crisis to reinforce nationalist feelings. The authorities let people post very fierce attacks on other countries, especially Japan and the United States, thereby channelling discontent toward external targets.
Finally, the authorities publicize their crackdowns on cyber-dissidents and their online surveillance ability. The Chinese technological arsenal is extremely effective and the cyber-police is enormous. Nonetheless, complete control of electronic communication is impossible. The most effective way to gag free expression is still to promote self-censorship by making Internet users believe in the regime’s omniscience. Sixty-one people imprisoned for expressing their views on the Internet is not a lot compared with the total number of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. But, when well-publicised, they suffice to foster fear and silence.
Internet as outlet for discontent
Discussion forums are widely used by Chinese Internet users to debate social issues. This is where scandals emerge and protests take shape. The “BMW affair” was a striking example. A peasant woman was killed by a reckless driver in a BMW in October 2003. At her trial, the driver just got a light fine. The sentence set off an enormous wave of discontent. Hundreds of thousands of messages were posted online criticising the judicial system. This alarmed the government to the point that it adopted a series of measures to prevent this kind of online protest movement from reoccurring.
Free expression in retreat
In February 2004, the government issued directives designed to ban sensitive issues from discussion forums on the major Chinese portals such as sohu.com and sina.com. As a result, most of the politicised discussion forums were closed down and moderators (ban zhu) worked twice as hard to censor debates. A few weeks later, the authorities blocked access to most blogs, the personal mini-sites that allowed tens of thousands of Chinese to publish their comments on current affairs.
Beijing also stepped up its programme of closures of small cyber-cafés. As they are hard to monitor, cyber-cafés will henceforth only be operated by a few large retail chains which are closely linked to the state and which will be forced to install standardized surveillance systems. Nowadays, it is not easy to talk politics on the Internet in China.
How Chinese censorship works
The architecture of the Chinese Internet was designed from the outset to allow information control. There are just five backbones or hubs through which all traffic must pass. No matter what ISP is chosen by Internet users, their e-mails and the files they download and send must pass through one of these hubs.
China then acquired state-of-the-art technology and equipment from US companies. Cisco Systems has sold China several thousand routers at more that 16,000 euros each for use in building the regime’s surveillance infrastructure. This equipment was programmed with the help of Cisco engineers. It allows the authorities to read data transmitted on the Internet and to spot “subversive” key words. The police are able to identify who visits banned sites and who sends “dangerous” e-mail messages.
The authorities have created an effective Internet filtering system. The far-reaching tentacles of its censorship affect news websites, ethnic minority sites, pornography, the Falungong spiritual movement and human rights. According to a study by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, China blocks access to several hundreds of thousands of sites. Some are blocked by their IP addresses, others by their domain name. But more subtle methods have also emerged. Beijing now practices DNS hijacking, in which someone trying to connect with a site is redirected to another site or an invalid address. This type of censorship is hard to detect by users, who think they have a bad link or wrong address.
The authorities also managed to directly censor search engines. In Yahoo!’s case the job is easy as the company complied with the government’s demands. But according to Benjamin Edelman, a specialist in online filtering techniques, the Google search engine is also controlled against its will by the Chinese government. Complete blocking of Google was tried in 2002 but it proved problematic as Google has become so intrinsic to the functioning of the Internet. China then succeeded in partially blocking its search results, excluding controversial subject matter. A search for the term Falungong, for example, now either temporarily blocks the user’s connection or gives no result.
Some Chinese Internet users manage to dodge the censorship. One way is to use proxy relays, that is to say, by connecting to the Internet through servers based abroad. Systems were subsequently set up by activists abroad to helps Internet users insider China to avoid the regime’s filters. Particularly active in this field are Citizenlab, a research laboratory at Toronto university, and Dynamic Internet Technology, a company run by Bill Xia, a Chinese émigré in the United States. The US government has also created an Office of Internet Freedom with the job of creating and distributing technologies that help Internet users in repressive countries to sidestep censorship.
China, the world’s biggest prison for cyber-dissidents
China arrested two cyber-dissidents between May 2003 and May 2004. Four others were released during the same period.
At the start of May 2004, 61 people were nonetheless in detention for posting messages or articles on the Internet that were considered subversive. Since May 2003, 17 of them have been tried and sentenced to terms of up to 14 years in prison. The courts have continued to stage travesties of justice that shamelessly flout the right of defence. Chinese intellectuals such as Liu Xiaobo have spoken out against these judicial iniquities. Liu has in particular criticised the authorities for applying article 105 of the criminal code - declaring “subversion” to be punishable with imprisonment - to cyber-dissidents who call for democracy.
Links
- Human Rights In China - an international NGO
- Xinhua - the governmental news agency
- Websites dealing with human rights in China: www.cicus.org, www.boxun.com
- A weblog on the Internet in Asia: sirc.blogspot.com
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