20050922 China's Model for a Censored Internet

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China's model for a censored Internet

from the September 22, 2005 edition

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0922/p01s02-woap.html?s=widep

Some worry China's controls could be copied elsewhere.

By Kathleen E. McLaughlin | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

SHANGHAI, CHINA – As China began to go online, observers made brash

predictions that the Internet would pry the country open. Cyberspace, the thinkingwent, would prove too vast and wild for Beijing to keep under its thumb.

Now these early assumptions are being sharply revised. Under an authoritariangovernment determined to control information, China has grown a new version of the

Internet. As former US President Bill Clinton noted recently, China's Internet is veryunlike the cauldron of dissenting voices that is the hallmark of the Internet familiar to

Americans. Instead, it's heavily filtered, monitored, censored, and most of all, focusedon making money.

The success of Beijing's strategy - to harness the network's business potential whileminimizing it as a conduit for free speech - has some concerned that it has established

a medium and new censoring tools that other countries can adopt.

"The biggest danger is that China creates a very large market and testing ground for surveillance and filtering software," says Danny O'Brien with the Electronic Frontier

Foundation in San Francisco.

As Chinese Web companies seek to enlarge their markets particularly in developing

countries, the question looms about whether they will export their values as well.Chinese tech firms have an eye on emerging markets in Africa, South America, and

India. These firms are probably peddling censorship tools, says the free-speechadvocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

The Paris-based organization releases a new report Thursday filled with tips for

bloggers and others to avoid censorship and monitoring. The report available on the





group's website, which is blocked here, crowns China the "world champion" of Internet censorship.

"China was one of the first countries to realize it couldn't do without the Internet andso it had to be brought under control," reads the report. "It's one of the few countriesthat've managed to block all material that criticizes the regime while expandingInternet facilities."

All this was done, the report adds, through "a clever mix of investment, technology

and diplomacy."

Part of the Chinese success has been co-opting American tech companies with the lureof its lucrative consumer market. Microsoft blocks bloggers from posting politicallysensitive words in Chinese; Google shuts down for several minutes when a user in

China looks too many times for forbidden words like "Falun Gong;" and Yahoorecently admitted turning over private e-mail information that helped lead to the

jailing of a Chinese journalist.

"I do not like the outcome," Yahoo chief Jerry Yang said of incident. But it's adecision he said he had to make when he decided to do business here.

Unlike other authoritarian regimes, notably North Korea and Cuba, which depend onkeeping the Web away from the people, China has promoted access - a fact that

initially surprised observers. Chinese leaders, says Julien Pain of Reporters WithoutBorders, knew they needed the Internet to attract global business and trade. Access is

abundant and cheap, and those who cannot afford a home computer rely on more than2 million Cybercafes nationwide. An estimated 134 million Chinese will be online by

the end of this year, according to the Beijing-based research firm Analysys

International, and nearly one-quarter use broadband.

"When you invest enough in technology and you buy technology from the bestcompanies abroad, you are certainly able to create a new kind of Internet, not based

on the free circulation of information but on market information," says Mr. Pain.

China's booming Internet content companies practice strict self-censorship when itcomes to politics and other controversial matters, knowing they must to stay in

business. The country's Internet Service Providers remain controlled by state-runcompanies, giving the government a window on every user's connection. It's an open



secret that around 30,000 telecom workers are dedicated to policing the net as part of the country's "Great Firewall."

However, less developed nations that may be attracted to the Chinese model areunlikely to have the same resources as Beijing to put into policing the net. And gapsdo remain in China's "Great Firewall" for those with enough technical savvy andenergy to exploit them. The use of proxies and e-mail encryption can help safeguard

communications for the truly determined.

But much of China's Web talent is focused on making money. China's best-known e-commerce guru, Jack Ma, is blunt about his approach to industry over free expression.

Plenty of other people are concerned with political issues, Mr. Ma says. He's justdoing business.

"We follow the rules and respect the local laws," says Ma, chief of Alibaba, Inc., thee-commerce Web giant that last month sold 40 percent of its shares to Yahoo Inc. for a

reported $1 billion.

Ma's contemporaries speak in more subtle ways about their self-censorship, saying it'sa necessary to build a booming business. During the Alibaba-sponsored conference in

Hangzhou, where Mr. Clinton also spoke, executives from China's most popular search engines and Web portals agreed they need to monitor content around the clock and quickly remove that which doesn't conform. They referred to "false" information

and said Chinese net users must use the Web responsibly.

Mickey Spiegel, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in New York, said it'sunlikely Western democracies would adopt China's Internet model. But "it's certainly

possible it will creep into places where there is a real anxiousness by leaders to

control information."

On an optimistic note, Mr. O'Brien says he does believe the Web's populist roots willwin out globally. "For every centralized attempt to censor and filter, there are

hundreds, thousands, of others working to circumvent it," he says. "And the further a particular approach spreads, the more people there are who are working to defeat it."

Yahoo, Chinese police, and a jailed journalist

from the September 09, 2005 editionBy Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor



HONG KONG – The role of the US Internet firm Yahoo in helping Chinese securityofficials to finger a journalist sentenced to 10 years for e-mailing "state secrets" is

filtering into mainland China. The revelation reinforces a conviction among many

Chinese "netizens" that there is no place security forces can't find them.

Yet if netizen reaction in China is resignation, the story of Yahoo's complicity in thearrest of Shi Tao, a journalist with the Contemporary Trade News in Hunan, brought a

spontaneous uproar among Western human rights and business watchdogs.

They say the case of Mr. Shi, convicted for e-mailing comments made in a newspaper staff meeting to a democracy group in New York, and whose IP Internet address was

given to Chinese officials by Yahoo - highlights both a deepening US corporateacceptance of illiberal Chinese laws and a little-noticed rise in the jailing of

journalists in China over the past two years.

Given that Bill Clinton will be in Hangzhou on Sept. 10 for a "China Internet

Summit" hosted by Yahoo's Chinese partner Alibaba.com, rights groups are urging theformer president to raise Shi's case and advocate a freer flow of information.

Yahoo Holdings Ltd. in Hong Kong worked with mainland Chinese police to find Shi,

according to court documents. So far, Yahoo has refused to offer details beyond thisstatement released Thursday: "Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites mustoperate within the [local] laws, regulations, and customs."

When queried whether Yahoo gave Shi's address to police after a court request, or

whether police simply phoned Yahoo offices on the mainland to get help, Hong KongYahoo marketing spokesperson Pauline Wong said she was "unable to give out any

information like that."

"For Yahoo to say it only must abide by 'customs,' well, that opens the floodgate,"

says Nicolas Becquelin of Human Rights In China. "Anything can be called acustom."

Legally, Yahoo is not obligated to cooperate with Chinese police. Yet in practice it

may have to. Unanswered so far are the terms by which Yahoo Hong Kong, operatingunder the "one country two systems" formula that allows autonomy, was forced to

conform to Chinese requests, despite its Hong Kong registry.



The Shi case also highlights vast differences in the Western and Chinese definitions of "state secrets." Beijing includes information on statistics, child labor laws, police

behavior, strikes, and riots.

"The content of state secrets in Chinese law ... goes far beyond ordinary definitions of national security to encompass, in fact, most information handled by the government,"says Mr. Becquelin.

Shi was arrested in November, and convicted in April of "providing state secrets

abroad." He had e-mailed personal notes from a staff meeting about overseas Chinesereturning for the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

Yet until the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders released court documentsshowing that Yahoo's Hong Kong subsidiary played the central role in identifying Shi

to police, his case was obscure.

"We think Yahoo's role is very sad in this case, and we hope Yahoo reexamines its policies," says Abi Wright of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has been

following Shi's case for months. "But frankly, it isn't Yahoo but the Chineseauthorities who are jailing this man, and we feel the focus of attention needs to remain

on the authorities."

In the past year, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been in competition to attract

China's 95 million Internet users. They have been pressured to comply with local lawsthat restrict news and discussion. Google has agreed with authorities to censor its

Chinese search engine, for example, as has Yahoo. Microsoft launched a Chinese blogservice that forbits users from using certain words.

In China, "netizens" is the term for a class of mostly educated, urban Chinese whoregularly use cyberspace for a range of activity and expression that exists in a grey

area. Netizens tend to write in a world of information broader than is found in publicculture. They read and discuss news and information from outside China that is not

officially approved and therefore exists at best, semilegally. Both netizens and chat-room users typically use anonymous e-mail addresses.

Chinese netizens received their first shock two years ago when authorities tracked

down one of the most famous anonymous cyber-essayists, Liu Di, who wrote under the name "Stainless-steel mouse." Ms. Liu, a college student, wrote satirically about



the fact that while most Chinese no longer believe the doctrines of communistideology, they must all act as if they do. Her writings caused much mirth - and official

wrath. Authorities tracked Liu Di to her college and had the administrators reveal her

identity through her IP address. She was then held for more than a year, withoutcharges, before being released. The case triggered an Internet campaign to have her released, and for authorities to relax their policies.

But, in the current Party campaign of "ideological strengthening" and control of information, which has taken place alongside a push for a "harmonious society," the

idealism that many felt characterized the Liu Di protest has largely evaporated.

"We understand that the Internet is not a safe space," says a cofounder of a BeijingInternet company. "We all have to be careful."

20050922 China's Model for a Censored Internet

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