Overview of Chinese Internet Censorship

There's an article in Time today that provides a good refresher course on Chinese web censorship.

Much of this effort relies on modern technology.

Employing much of the same information-screening and filtering technology used worldwide to combat pornography and spammers, Beijing has built a Great Firewall of China that restricts viewing of scores of foreign websites (such as those for Amnesty International and numerous news sites); the government has also deployed tens of thousands of Internet police to investigate online crimes, including political offenses. While some tech-savvy surfers can find ways through the firewall and past Web police monitors, the vast majority of China's 100-million online population will search in vain for Mandarin equivalents of the Drudge Report, blog screeds and independent journalism that define free online speech in most of the world. A recent study by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society concluded that "China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world."

Hmmm. Amnesty International? What? The Chinese government doesn't want its proles to know how badly America treats its prisoners (and worse still, their free Korans) in Gitmo?

Of course, good-old fashioned government force and the fear it induces are what really keep the lid clamped down.

... Beijing maintains control by instilling the fear in Web scribes and online businesses that they are being watched -- and that, if they cross the line, they are risking their investment, their business, even their freedom. The threat is real: Human Rights Watch estimates that 60 Chinese are serving prison sentences for Internet-based political crimes, and Beijing frequently closes down websites operating on Chinese soil whose owners allow controversial postings.

Indeed, far from loosening up, Beijing is intensifying its scrutiny of the Web. Last week, the State Council released even more stringent regulations—aimed at online forums, blogs and wireless SMS messaging—that bar postings of news that goes against "national security and the public interest."

Sadly, the Chi-Comms are being aided and abetted by a today's version of Armand Hammer: The unholy corporate trinity of Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google.

Yahoo!'s China operation was widely criticized last month for turning over information to the police that helped send journalist Shi Tao to prison for 10 years (Shi had posted a list of topics that Chinese newspapers were forbidden to cover, including the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre). Yahoo! officials said they had no choice but to abide by the "laws, regulations and customs" of countries where it does business. It isn't alone in its sensitivity to local customs: Microsoft's MSN portal blocks the Chinese words for "democracy" and "freedom" from the blogs it hosts, while Google omits banned websites from its search results.

And yet, there are a couple of rays of hope. One of them is the sheer size of China and her economy, as reported recently by George Reisman (HT: The General).

More important was what I saw from the ship as we left Shanghai: mile after mile of factories, power plants, wharves, an incredible number of cargo cranes and containers. (About once a year, I get a view of the cranes and containers in San Pedro, which is the port for Los Angeles and by some accounts the busiest in the US. I'm sorry to say that I think it's dwarfed by what I saw in Shanghai.)

As the 2008 Olympics approaches, which is to be held in Beijing, I think there'll be a major discovery process with respect to China. The television cameras will be working overtime to show the sights in the city and probably elsewhere in the country.

How long can any government keep such a huge, dynamic society under its boot? And furthermore, this begs the intriguing question of whether these images will be transmitted to the poverty-stricken countryside. If even a decent portion of that populace, which the Chi-Comms are already having to work hard to control, has access to such images, might there be rebellion in the countryside?

Another ray of hope is that there are ways around the "Great Fire Wall of China", and people are using them.

[D]etermined Chinese web surfers manage to tunnel through today's firewall with the help of software that guides them to overseas "proxy servers," computers that enable them to fetch and view banned content. Activists smuggle proxy software into China and pass it hand-to-hand on flash memory devices. "It's really cat and mouse," says Bill Xia, president of U.S.-based Dynamic Internet Technology, whose product bounces users among many proxy servers, making it hard to track the surfer's identity.

On a recent afternoon, a Chinese reporter in Beijing used one of these programs to watch a video of the Tiananmen massacre on his IBM ThinkPad. "See that boy facing down a line of tanks?" he says. "I'd heard about that." In most countries, this ability to track down elusive information is now little more than a mundane miracle of modern technology. In China, this unconstrained curiosity remains a perilous threat -- to both the browser and Beijing.

Not clear, however, is whether such software can be used at all by most Chinese internet users, who use cybercafes where they must sign in with their national ID number to use the web. I'm doubtful.

-- CAV