Behind The Great Firewall : Berkeley university paper.
Yannick -Ed
"Behind The Great Firewall, by Andrew Moss.
To the Chinese, freedom of speech isn't really the issue."
---
"They have closed off Tiananmen Square.
The huge portrait of Mao stares across an empty Square at the giant
mausoleum to the south where the Chairman's body is usually on
display. Officially the Square has been blocked off because the
President of Malaysia is visiting. But today is June 3, the
anniversary of the 1989 uprising that left hundreds dead in Beijing—
perhaps more, nobody really knows—and jolted all of China. Police are
everywhere. The Square is ringed with soldiers.
And the government has laid down the line: "The safety and security of
Tiananmen Square and other key areas is the first and most important
priority—they must be rigidly controlled and kept absolutely secure.
We must appropriate our successful experiences during the Olympic
Games …. We must adequately guide public opinion and be mentally
persuasive, creating a healthy and harmonious public opinion
environment."
This means you must not talk about what actually happened in 1989.
Twenty years earlier, weeks of escalating student protests and a
massive hunger strike in the Square had spread dissent to many parts
of the country. The government was split and vacillating. Finally Deng
Xiaoping, the man who had brought capitalism back to China, asserted
control. Military units were sent into Beijing with orders to suppress
the students by any means necessary, and on June 4 they reached the
Square. Faced with tanks and machine guns, the students were persuaded
to abandon their hunger strike and leave. There were no deaths in
Tiananmen Square itself, but many supporters died on the Square's
western approaches.
Today, television and the print media are controlled and "Tiananmen
Square Massacre," "June 4," and "Chinese democracy movement" are all
censored terms on the Chinese Internet. The government has shut down
many local websites. "We have designated June 3 to June 6 as the
national server maintenance days," it piously explains, "This move is
widely supported by the public." Meanwhile, foreign sites including
Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr have been blocked. Public discussion of
what happened in 1989 is off limits, pushed behind the Great Firewall.
For a Westerner studying Mandarin at language school, the tight
governmental control is a weird experience. And can it work in a
country with 300 million Internet users? Three Beijing experts offered
some surprising opinions.
Jeremy Goldkorn, a fast-talking South African, edits Danwei, the best
known English-language website in Beijing. "People see this country as
an unreconstructed totalitarian state," he tells me. "Western media
tend to give people the impression it's still the 1970s here, which
it's certainly not. There is debate in China. There are people willing
to give the authorities the middle finger. If you're trying to
understand China, if you think that everybody is a robot, you're not
going to understand what's happening here."
We are sitting in the Stone Boat café in Ritan Park, one of the
beautifully tended parks that make Beijing bearable in midsummer.
Around us, mixed groups of Chinese and Westerners from the city's new
business class sip white wine and Tsingtao beer.
The Internet has become a Fourth Estate in China, Goldkorn says. "Kids
know how to use free proxy servers. There are people who download
Freegate and Ultrasurf, these Falun Gong tools that help you get
around the firewall. This Green Dam thing has been discussed and
compared …."
Green Dam is the filtering software that the government wanted
installed on all new PCs—supposedly to filter out pornography, though
it would work just as well on politics. Under a hail of withering
comment on the Web, the government backed off. "Green Dam Girl," the
anime figure created to protest the software, has become an Internet
meme representing governmental stupidity.
"Westerners tend to underestimate the incompetence of the Communist
Party when it comes to good old-fashioned totalitarianism," Goldkorn
said. "That said, they've done a really great job economically …. Few
people here are interested in sacrificing practical gain for
principles …. Free speech is way back there. It's not a priority of
pretty much anyone."
"I myself have got to the point where I'm not paranoid any more," he
said. "You can have a very free intellectual life here thanks to the
Internet. You can sit here in Ritan Park and say 'Zhao Ziyang' and
nobody's going to stop you."
"Zhao Ziyang!" he shouted out to Ritan Park. "Zhao Ziyang!" He was
talking about the General Secretary of the Communist Party and former
premier who went out into the Square in 1989 to talk the students out
of the hunger strike.
For this Zhao was put under house arrest for the remainder of his
life, which turned out to be 16 years. His posthumous memoirs,
smuggled out of China, were published in the West last year, to
coincide with the anniversary. He is an unperson in China, his name a
banned search term on the Web.
The Square is open the next day. There are plain-clothes police on the
approaches and uniformed police are carefully checking IDs. But in the
Square, things appear normal, at first. Chinese tourists are snapping
pictures of each other as usual. But every part of the Square is also
occupied by a group of sturdy young men in matching-colored shirts—red
shirts in front of Mao's portrait, orange in front of the Great Hall
of the People, yellow in front of Mao's Mausoleum. They are volunteers
or police auxiliaries. The cheerfulness is a lie: Any kind of
demonstration will instantly be squelched. Nobody comments on this.
Nobody attempts to talk to the colored shirts. After 20 years of the
"healthy and harmonious public opinion environment," have they simply
forgotten what happened here 20 years before?
"I've lived here long enough to develop some empathy for the regime,"
says Kaiser Kuo '88, a musician, writer, and successful media
consultant, known as the man who introduced heavy metal music into
China. "I don't buy that if they liberalize a bit, suddenly all hell
breaks loose and the country spins wildly out of control. But they
really do believe that. They look at Teheran and they think that could
happen here."
Kuo was touring China in June of 1989 with his band, Tang Dynasty
(named, he says, for the openness to foreign influences of the Tang
era, AD 618–907). Then the country blew up. Kuo left hurriedly and
spent the next few years trying to understand what he had seen. In
1995 he came back to China and he's been here ever since.
Kuo, a slightly intimidating figure with an emphatic style, is not
romantic about 1989. "The students didn't realize what they were
doing," he says. "They were playing with symbols that gave them far
more political potency than they were ready to manage. The students
didn't think through the consequences of their extremism."
We are meeting at Starbucks in the WanDa shopping center—one of the
many glittering new malls in consumption-crazy Beijing. Terminator IV
and Night at the Museum II are playing next door, and well-dressed
young people are text-messaging all around us. The Internet, Kuo
thinks, has heightened the political tension because so many people
now have access to information. "How many people had devices in their
hand in 1989? These issues are now being talked about in the mobile
phone world. There's a whole lot more water behind that dam …."
"Everyone wants civil rights. It's just a matter of getting from A to
B."
Even the government? I ask.
"I think the government eventually does want it. These are incredibly
pragmatic people. They are not sinister and malign. I think they are
trying to create conditions that lead to genuinely more democratic
policies. But … 'feed them, clothe them, and house them' first."
Starbucks closes, decanting us into the sweaty Beijing night. "Why is
it," Kuo says, "that the only people who get uptight about it are
foreigners? There's a fundamental question that plagues Americans: Why
don't the Chinese hate their government as much as I think they ought
to?"
I walk back to my apartment mulling over this reproof and turn on the
TV. The Teheran demonstrations are running on CNN—emailed cell-phone
videos of frantically running crowds and baton-swinging riot policemen
"… very reminiscent of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989," the
commentator says.
Instantly a censor somewhere pushes a thumb down on a button and CNN
goes black.
Maybe it is only dumb foreigners who get uptight about 1989. Only dumb
foreigners from the older generation, at that: The expat students at
the language school aren't interested. I am relieved when my 24-year-
old Chinese teacher pulls out a single memory. "My father said the
tanks were parked behind the Great Hall of the People," she says.
"Where the National Theater is now." Single memories are all you have
when collective memory is erased.
Liu Xiaobiao, a journalist and editorial writer based in Beijing (and
a Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in
2004) was at the Square in 1989. He is another no-nonsense Chinese
intellectual with an intense and powerful rhetorical style. We met at
my apartment, in an affluent development near an upscale mall with a
Fauchon grocery in the basement.
"The censorship towards the media is stricter, more intensive now than
before," he says. "However the result is getting weaker and weaker.
This is because there are so many problems in China. If you don't want
us to cover one story, we can cover another story. They cannot censor
everything."
And, he adds, there are many outlets. "So if you don't allow me to
publish an article with a certain opinion, I will find another way to
express my opinion."
But Liu is wary of the politics of the Internet. Its "civic agenda,"
promoting justice and opposing corruption, is weak, he says. "We have
to take a close look at Chinese Internet users … 70–80 percent of them
didn't receive a college education." This, combined with the rise of
nationalism, means the online "commercial agenda" is much more potent
than the civic agenda. "Most of the Internet users only care about sex
or the NBA."
And what about the government's heavy censorship of the June 4
anniversary?
"Hai pa!" he says sharply. I know what that means: "They're scared!"
"In 1989 I was a college student and I participated in the events in
Tiananmen Square," he says. Afterwards, he says, he believed the
government would "tell the truth sooner or later."
Then he tells a story about Peking University in northwest Beijing,
which produces the country's elite and was a wellspring of the 1989
protests.
In the former political center of the campus he found no students,
only what appeared to be plainclothes policemen. And on the walls
where the political posters were in 1989, "there were only
advertisements. I saw some students having class, so I just entered
and listened. The teacher was young, younger than me. That class was
about politics."
They were discussing the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, which
punished intellectuals who dared to criticize the Communist Party
during Mao's brief Hundred Flowers campaign. Some 300,000 lost their
jobs or went to labor camps. It was a forerunner of the brutal attacks
of the Cultural Revolution. "The teacher put out some posters about
the Anti-Rightist movement and the students laughed when they saw
them. The general meaning was that the Anti-Rightist movement was
necessary because those people started to attack our socialism and our
government.
"So at that moment I felt that not only the students had changed but
also the professors had changed. After 1989 the government education
control in the university was very effective and they achieved their
goal."
The last word goes to Sima Qian, the Han Dynasty historian (ca. 100
BC). This comes from the Web (of course), via Jottings from the
Granite Studio, the blog of Jeremiah Jenne, a Beijing-based Qing
historian from UC Davis whom I met for breakfast in the embassy.
[King Li of Zhou] acted cruelly and extravagantly. The people in
the capital spoke of the king's faults. The Duke of Shao remonstrated,
saying: "Your people can no longer bear your orders." The king was
angered. He found a shaman from Wei and had him watch for criticism.
Whomever he reported was killed. The criticism subsided, [but] the
feudal lords stopped coming to court. In the thirty-fourth year [of
his reign], the king became even more stern. No one in the capital
dared to say a word, but only glanced at each other on the roads. King
Li was pleased. He told the Duke of Shao: "I was able to stop the
criticism. Now they dare not speak."
The Duke of Shao said: "This is [merely] stopping up criticism. To
block people's mouths is worse than blocking a river. When an
obstructed river bursts its banks, it will surely hurt a great number
of people. People are like this, too. For this reason, those who
regulate rivers dredge them and let them flow; those who regulate
people broaden [channels] and let them talk ….
The king would not listen. Then no one in the capital dared to say
a word. Three years [later], they joined each other in rebellion, and
attacked the king. King Li fled to Chih.
At the end of our interview, Jenne warns me that there might be
difficulty getting through to The Granite Studio's archives.
Sometimes, he said, the censors don't like his postings.
Postscript: After the massive riots in the western province of
Xinjiang in July 2009, Internet censorship tightened up in China. Many
websites were blocked (including Jeremy Goldkorn's blog, Danwei).
Although the Chinese government has retreated from its Green Dam
proposal, censorship seems to be getting worse, rather than better.
Social networking sites and YouTube are currently blocked, as is
Yeeyan, the journalism translation site. At time of writing, Google is
considering withdrawing from China because of an attempt to hack into
the email accounts of several human rights activists. Interested
readers can follow the struggle on Rebecca McKinnon's blog
RConversation or on Berkeley's own China Digital Times, the excellent
China news accumulator site run by Professor Qiang Xiao in the
Graduate School of Journalism.
Andrew Moss, Ph.D. '79, can be reached at am...@epi-center.ucsf.edu.
Categories:
* Policy
Comments
4 comments posted
April 7 2010, 4:34AM Posted by Andy Macdonald
Good article and great post from 'Anonymous'. Thanks.
* reply
April 6 2010, 10:03PM Posted by Anonymous
Mr. Moss,
I am hoping after you spent time in China and after speaking with
these people, you came away knowing that Chinese people want freedom
of speech, everyone does.
As you know the Chinese people have endured much suffering for so
long, they have lived under this brutal regime now for some 61 years,
many seem to be interested in just making money.
But given the opportunity to be able to really speak out I believe
they would, and many are right now on the internet. Many are demanding
freedom of speech and taking it back on-line. They are blogging,
tweeting and speaking up when they see Government injustice.
As far as the Chinese experts you spoke with, Jeremy Goldkorn has done
a great job, I believe he's worked very hard to bring a balanced view
to his Danwei blog.
(Sad it is now blocked)
He is a Westerner who has a real appreciation for both China and the
Chinese people, and stands up for their right to have both free speech
and internet freedom. I admire him and the work he as accomplished in
China. I think the Chinese people really respect him.
It was great that you had a chance to speak with Liu Xiaobiao, a true
Chinese Hero. Sadly as you know by now his has been put in prison for
speaking out. He stood in Tiananmen in 89, he co-wrote Charter 08 and
he too believes that the Chinese people want and deserve freedom of
speech, rule of law, and all the other freedoms that all people
deserve.
Unfortunately when people like Liu speak out they have to suffer under
this regime and of course this discourages others. It does not mean
they don't want freedom of speech.
Not sure why you think Kaiser Kuo is a Chinese expert. Born and raised
in the US living in freedom and comfort, he goes to China, and while
students his age stood and fought for their freedom in 89, he high-
tails it out of China. Now, safely back China living high off the hog
and enjoying everything China has to offer. As long as he can access
the net, make a living talking to publications including the mouth-
piece of the Communist Government, he could care less about ordinary
Chinese people and their right to have freedom of speech or any rights
for that matter. I have read what he has to say and heard him speak.
His views are right on line with the Chinese Government and sorry to
say are pathetic. Just because you live in the country does not make
you an expert.
While China is enjoying a more Capitalist society and some are living
similar to middle class in Western counties, the majority of China
people still live significantly below the poverty line.
But, rich or poor, without freedom what do you really have?
FYI, Yes, Rebecca McKinnon's blog RConversation and Berkeley's own
China Digital Times, run by Professor Qiang Xiao in the Graduate
School of Journalism are excellent."
Thanks for this article.
---END---
Yannick -Ed
Another paper about the "Chinternet"...
For those of you who have subscribed to 110 East group, you are
reading this in your e-mail. It's sure a long read, but several of our
subscribers (in China) can't access the article itself through the
web. Sending the whole thing by e-mail is the only way to deliver this
master-class article.
Sincerely yours,
- Yannick.
SOURCE : http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25032/?nlid=2895
MIT Technology Review : China's Internet Paradox.
" Will China's Web, like its larger economy, comfortably combine
extraordinary growth with government repression?
By David Talbot
On March 23, the day after Google pulled its search operations out of
mainland China, a woman who uses the online pseudonym Xiaomi arose in
her Shanghai apartment and sat down in her bedroom office for another
day of outwitting Internet censorship. She leads a confederation of
volunteer translators around the world who turn out Mandarin versions
of Western journalism and scholarly works that are banned on China's
Internet--and that wouldn't be available in Mandarin in any case. That
day, working in a communal Google Docs account, she and her fellow
volunteers completed translations of texts that ranged from a fresh
New York Times interview with Google cofounder Sergey Brin to "The
Limits of Authoritarian Resilience," a seven-year-old analysis of
China's Communist Party from the Journal of Democracy.
What happened when Xiaomi hit "Post" reveals that the government's
constraints have their limits. The pieces went live on a blog and a
public Google Docs page. These links were broadcast to the nearly
4,000 people who follow her on Twitter (as @xiaomi2020), the 1,170
more who follow her on Google Buzz, and others on five Chinese Twitter
clones. Although Blogspot and Twitter are blocked in China to those
without circumvention software, anybody in the country can open the
Google Docs page--at least for now. (The government did block Google
Docs for a time last year but relented after protests from companies
and universities.) Once posted, Xiaomi's translations are often
reposted 10,000 times or more on blogs and bulletin-board-style
discussion sites. There, they can survive for various lengths of time,
though the hosting services--which are required to self-censor--
generally take them down. The total readership may be orders of
magnitude higher than the number of repostings, since each post is
presumably read by many people, some of whom also copy the
translations into group e-mails.
Xiaomi takes steps to preserve her anonymity and avoid run-ins with
the authorities. (Such encounters often start when police summon
someone to the local station to"drink tea"--the euphemism for
questioning designed to let people know they are being watched--and
can end with imprisonment.) She uses Gmail (which is encrypted and
hosted outside China) and technologies that make her computer's
Internet Protocol address appear to come from the United States (the
address changes frequently to thwart blocking). When she needs to
talk, she uses the encrypted Internet voice service Skype--a version
she installed in the United States, not one available in China that
was found to allow surveillance.
What she achieves with the help of such tools is hardly the only
example of free speech and protest percolating through China's
censored Internet. In recent years Internet-based campaigns--efforts
that often blossom on bulletin boards and blogs in hours or days--have
pressured the Chinese government to release prisoners, launch
investigations into scandals such as the kidnapping of boys
conscripted into slave labor, and imprison corrupt government
officials. "The Internet has empowered the Chinese people more than
the combined effects of 30 years of [economic] growth, urbanization,
exports, and investments by foreign firms," says Yasheng Huang, a
China expert and professor of international management at MIT's Sloan
School. "China may not have free speech, but it has freer speech,
because the Internet has provided a platform for Chinese citizens to
communicate with each other." And that communication can include
criticism of the government.
China's attempts to suppress Internet speech have intensified. But
they have intensified partly because there's so much more material
online--maybe overwhelmingly more--for the government to worry about.
China's Internet, like its economy in general, is exploding in size
and complexity. The country now has a staggering 384 million Internet
users--nearly a quarter of the world total--plus 750 million mobile-
phone users, many of whom use those phones to access the Web. That
rapid growth of the network, coupled with the remarkable creativity
and boldness of its users, is shaping the Chinese Web at least as
powerfully as is government repression. "We underestimate the vitality
of the Chinese Internet," says Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of Global
Voices, a blogging advocacy group. "We hear it is censored and
therefore assume every page has a red background and text from the
central propaganda agency. We badly underestimate how vital and how
interesting some of those conversations can end up being. This is now
the largest Internet, bigger than that of the United States. Why do we
have a blind spot around this? We assume censored means 'Dead.
Lifeless. Artificial.' What 'censored' actually means is 'really,
really complicated.' "
A Higher Firewall
The Chinese government operates the world's most sophisticated
national Internet filtering system. Though often called the Great
Firewall, it is not one entity but, rather, a mix of strategies.
Filters at the ISP level block banned Western websites (including
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and the Guardian's site) and can
block websites whose URLs contain any of an ever-growing list of
banned keywords related to politically sensitive topics. The
government stepped up its efforts in 2009, especially before the 20th
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4 and the 60th
anniversary of China's National Day on October 1. The regime even
unplugged the entire Net in the Urumqi region to block reports of
violent protests over the ethnically motivated murders of migrant
workers. Finally, the government for a short time required that all
computers be sold with porn filtering software known as Green Dam
preinstalled. (Faced with international and domestic outrage when it
emerged that the filter also blocked political speech--and was buggy
and insecure regardless of its intended function--officials announced
an indefinite delay.) It was a hacking attack that Google said had
targeted the Gmail accounts of human rights activists that
precipitated the company's March decision to stop censoring search
results and shut down its site in mainland China.
To get around the blocks, some people use tools such as Ultrareach,
Dynaweb, and Tor (see "Dissent Made Safer," May/June 2009), which
enable them to connect to banned websites via proxy computers outside
the country. But government censors have increasingly been blocking
the proxies, too. And in truth, most Chinese Internet users don't
bother with Western sites at all. Over the past decade, homegrown
alternatives to popular Western Web 2.0 sites have become
extraordinarily popular. Instead of Facebook, China has Douban, whose
users are generally anonymous and gravitate toward topics such as
movie and book critiques rather than personal news. Instead of
YouTube, China has YouKu, which naturally tilts toward Chinese
topics.
China's bulletin-board sites--led by QQ, the second most popular
website in China and the 10th most popular in the world--are teeming
with debates over current events. Hal Roberts, a fellow at the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and a leading
researcher on Internet filtering and surveillance, says that sites
hosted in China account for about 95 percent of page views there.
"Whereas a country like Turkey will get upset at a video about the
Armenian genocide and block YouTube," he says, "China blocks YouTube
but also gives people YouKu, which is censored, but which they say is
better anyway, natively in Mandarin, and run by Chinese people."
The Chinese government allows these sites to flourish only because
they have agreed to censor themselves. But the forbidden topics are
not clearly defined, and the extent of the censorship varies. "In
China everyone knows there are hidden rules," says Isaac Mao, a
Chinese software engineer and venture capitalist based in Shanghai,
who became one of China's first bloggers in 2002. Criticism of the
regime, promotion of democracy, and advocacy of human rights or
Tibetan independence are often censored; so is discussion of specific
incidents and scandals ranging from the Tiananmen Square crackdown of
1989 to the Sichuan earthquake scandal of 2008, in which the collapse
of many shoddily built school buildings contributed to the deaths of
more than 5,000 children. The Chinese government increasingly imposes
heavy fines or shutdowns--or even jail time for principals--to make
local Web companies follow these implicit rules. A few years ago, a
government officer would "call your phone, ask you to delete some
article in one day, or in [a few] hours," says Huo Ju, a computer
programmer in Shanghai, who runs a technology blog that is blocked in
China. "The Chinese government didn't close websites or companies. But
in 2009, many websites [were] closed. They also delete articles, and
they try to control opinion direction." Meanwhile, the government
rewards good behavior. Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese
Internet who is now a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center
for Information Technology Policy, wrote of attending a government
event in Beijing last November at which executives from 20 Chinese
Internet companies were awarded the 2009 China Internet Self-
Discipline Award for censoring themselves in the interest of
"harmonious and healthy Internet development." "China can use offline
methods of control," says Roberts. "At the end of the day, it is more
effective to send government agents to people's doors than to filter
the Net."
China's users filter themselves, too. The Tianya.cn bulletin board,
with more than 35 million members, manages a kind of wiki-style self-
censorship. Posts are ruled on by communities of "board
masters" (ordinary users elected by other members); if they cut a
post, the poster can appeal to a higher-tier editor in a complaint
forum. A board master can be dismissed if enough people complain. This
in some sense mirrors the way Chinese society works, and Donnie Dong,
a Chinese lawyer and Internet scholar who is now a fellow at the
Berkman Center, says it is readily accepted. "The reality is that the
condition in China has changed the structure of the Internet into
something distinct," he says. He calls it the "Cinternet"; Xiaomi and
some others call it the "Chinternet." Either way, says Dong, "the law,
including statutes and the 'living law,' is making and changing the
code."
Protests go viral
But this living law has neither checked the overall expansion of Web
access nor stanched the online activism that tests the limits of
censorship--especially on internal Chinese sites. The Chinese search
engine Baidu offers discussion forums that--although cleansed of
political topics--are extremely popular. One day last summer, an
anonymous member posted something on a Baidu forum devoted to the
online game World of Warcraft, and it became an Internet meme: Jia
Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. The cheeky,
mysterious sentence received seven million hits and 300,000 comments
on the first day. People built humorous dialogues around it; graphics
made it appear as if the command had been uttered by Barack Obama,
Saddam Hussein, or Chinese military officials posing for a formal
Communist Party portrait.
Then the goofy phenomenon took a sharp political turn. Around the time
the post originally appeared, a famous blogger named Guo Baofeng was
arrested for posting allegations of an official cover-up in the brutal
rape of a 25-year-old woman named Yan Xiaoling in Mawei, a district in
the city of Fuzhou. She later died of her injuries.
Before his incarceration, Guo managed to squeeze off a couple of short
blog posts. "I have been arrested by Mawei police SOS," read one. Even
in repressive China, there's no law against exhorting people to go
home to their mothers. Bloggers began calling on people to send
postcards to the Mawei police: Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to
go home to eat. Similar messages sprouted on bulletin-board sites. A
few days later, Guo was released; he later attributed his freedom to
the Internet-generated "postcard movement." The use of Web 2.0 in the
Guo case "is fascinating, and it is also revealing about some of the
general features of online social activism in China today," says
Guobin Yang, a sociologist and China Internet scholar at Columbia
University. "Compared with the student movement in 1989, where people
had large-scale gatherings, today's activists work on special issues,
like calling for the release of a particular person or dealing with
corruption or environmental pollution through very creative means.
Much of this is happening on the Internet, with a lot of impact."
Sometimes the Chinese Web simply amplifies citizen outrage, forcing
government action. In 2007 a local newspaper in Henan province
reported a kidnapping scandal: boys were being snatched to work as
slaves in brick kilns. The issue failed to excite the interest of
national authorities until a woman posted a letter about it on a local
online bulletin board. The letter was cross-posted to Tianya and went
viral, garnering 580,000 hits there and many more on other forums,
according to an analysis of the case by Yang. The attention prompted
the central government to investigate and prosecute two people. And in
Nanjing, amid anger over high housing prices, local bloggers broadcast
the fact that Zhou Jiugeng, a former director of a government property-
management bureau, was driving to work in a Cadillac and wearing an
expensive watch. The revelation led to an investigation--and an 11-
year prison sentence for Zhou, who was found to have been accepting
bribes.
Even lawyers and judges are testing the limits. Anne Cheung, a law
professor and Internet researcher at Hong Kong University, says she
and her colleagues are finding previously unheard-of criticism of the
regime. One lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, often blogs about the plight of
citizens who try to lodge legal complaints in Beijing but end up in
secret jails. Some government officials are criticized by name.
Criticism of the Chinese Communist Party used to be "a sensitive
area," Cheung says, "but now, somehow, the authorities will tolerate
that." In general, "if you have the courage to raise your voice, then
you may be able to get something out of the Internet and Web 2.0," she
adds.
Internet Consensus?
A swiftly growing Chinese Internet; restrictions by the central
government; a degree of collusion with those restrictions among Web
companies and the public, so long as they are not onerous to business;
a calculation by the government that permits some dissidence: all this
might amount to an Internet version of the Beijing Consensus, a
catchall term for alternative models of economic development that take
China's success as an example. The Chinese government has a long
tradition of managing dissent. And Cheung thinks the two trends--
growing governmental control of the Web on the one hand and online
growth, creativity, and activism on the other--will continue pushing
and pulling on each other for some time. Progress toward Internet
openness "may be incremental, not moving in a linear direction," she
says. "I would say this is consistent with Chinese style--loosening
sometimes, but tightening sometimes. You can't really predict."
To break the stalemate and tear down the Great Firewall, some
activists and members of Congress have advocated that the West push on
two fronts. One is purely technological: make available far more proxy
computers, those neutral IP addresses in other countries from which
users in China can access an entirely open Internet. But that would be
costly--and in any case most Chinese use only Chinese sites, which are
subject to self-censorship, not network-level blocking. The second
tactic is to apply pressure through Western companies that are deeply
involved in the Chinese Internet--companies that provide the routers,
the filtering software (variations on the technology that filters
pornography and other content in other countries), and the PCs that
Chinese consumers buy. The Global Network Initiative (GNI), a
consortium of corporations, academics, and human rights groups that
formed in 2008, is working on a voluntary code of corporate conduct to
support free speech and human rights, but to date only Microsoft,
Google, and Yahoo have signed on (the latter company after it gave
Chinese authorities data on activists named Li Zhi and Shi Tao,
resulting in their imprisonment). "It's better to join the GNI before
you get stuck with a Yahoo case ... rather than wait until they are
yelling at you in Congress and calling you moral pygmies," says
MacKinnon, a cofounder of the GNI. But as MacKinnon pointed out in a
recent blog post, these ideas go only so far; the only Chinese
anticensorship techniques that will work on a large scale will be ones
generated by the Chinese themselves. Zuckerman adds that well-meaning
Westerners would do well to at least become familiar with Chinese
online norms and customs. "Until we understand what Chinese users like
and want and use, it's hard for us to understand how we would design
alternatives to censorship that are likely to succeed," he points
out.
That's where activists such as Xiaomi fit in. "Some people will wonder
who is doing this, and why," she said, speaking to me through her
secure Skype connection. Her motivations, she explained, are the same
as those that drew her, as an undergraduate in 1989, to the democracy
protests in Tiananmen Square. She recalls a Woodstock-like experience,
with people singing and falling in love as they camped out. She left
on May 28, 1989--one week before the crushing response by Chinese
tanks and soldiers--and went on to earn an MBA at a U.S. school and
prosper as a software consultant. "In my generation, most of us have
done well. We caught the opportunity of China's booming economy," she
said. "But there are dreams that are not fulfilled yet. We had them
for more than 20 years, and things are still getting even worse and
not better."
Huang, of MIT, argues that the protestors of Tiananmen might never
have imagined seeing the criticisms of policies and officials that are
online today. "We should measure progress in China not by protests on
the streets and availability of news on protests, but by the
involvement of the Chinese citizens in policy discussions," Huang
says. "By the latter yardstick, China has made huge progress, thanks
largely to the Internet. The Internet is already changing China, and
it will change the country for the better in the future." China's
Internet, like its society and economy as a whole, might move fitfully
and incrementally toward greater freedom. Because as activists like
Xiaomi grow more creative--and the Great Firewall grows more
sophisticated--the Chinese Internet is simply ... growing. And even
Xiaomi, who experiences the Great Firewall firsthand and is less
optimistic than Huang, believes that the wall "eventually will fail."
David Talbot is Technology Review's Chief Correspondent.
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
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