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China's Two-Faced Internet Policies (and the People Who Skirt Them) |
Communist leaders like the economic potential of the Net, but hate that meddling content. Dissidents, meanwhile, are finding new ways to avoid censors--including Napster-like peer-to-peer approaches--in their never-ending cat and mouse game with authorities. |
Posted on August 14, 2000
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Kevin McLaughlin
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The FBI's proposed Carnivore email surveillance system may shock and anger many Americans, but in China, Net users are accustomed to this type of government involvement. As China's online population grows, the Communist regime is struggling to regulate the Net and still reap the economic benefits. Displeased with the emerging picture, Chinese dissidents and human rights advocates are preparing creative tools to fight the filtering.
If numbers from the state-run China National Network Information Center (CNNIC) are to be believed, China has more than 17 million Net users as of June 2000. It's not unlikely that "cousins" of Carnivore could soon be filtering, tracing, and monitoring everything Chinese users do online, report Chinese democracy advocates.
So some advocates, like exiled Chinese dissident Richard Long, have developed work-arounds to circumvent government censorship mechanisms, which traditionally block Western news sites such as CNN and the BBC, plus human rights and pro-Democracy sites.
Long, an activist who took part in the 1989 Tienanmen Square demonstrations, edits the Washington, D.C.-based VIP Reference, one of several email newsletters featuring news and views that are unavailable to Mainland Chinese. "The primary things the government does not like people to talk about are freedom, democracy, human rights, and Communist Party scandals," Long explains. "Therefore, we focus directly on these issues."
Founded in 1997, VIP Reference has more than a million subscribers, many of them inside China. But to ensure that the daily mailing continues to reach Mainland subscribers, Long must use tactics similar to those of spammers--for example, changing headers to disguise the origin of the mail and avoid filtering software.
Web-based email gives people in China another, ostensibly safer way to receive VIP Reference and similar email publications. However, the dissidents don't trust it, and their doubts are understandable. Yahoo!, for example, has implemented a type of self-censorship, excluding Websites related to human rights, democracy, or Tibetan freedom from its directory, according to VIP Reference Publisher Shengde Lian, another exiled dissident living in Washington. This applies only to searches in Chinese, not English, but is an ominous sign, in his opinion. "In general, Yahoo! abides by the laws of the countries that it does business in," said a Yahoo! spokesperson, when asked about the company's policies in China.
Long knows that the government may eventually find a way to block his mailings. To maintain the vital link to readers in China, Long is working to create a Napster-like program that will let him stay one step ahead of the Chinese authorities. "The peer-to-peer networking model has great potential for sharing politically sensitive information," Long says. "I don't think the government will be able to shut it down."
According to Leonard Sussman, a senior scholar at Freedom House, a New York-based human rights organization, several contradictions characterize China's approach to doing business on the Net on a large scale.
"On the one hand, government officials want to keep the Internet industry booming, but they also want to maintain control over it so that potentially objectionable material doesn't get through," Sussman says. "The trade-off is obviously wanting the economy to grow, and the skills and technology to develop, while at the same time fearing it."
Recent, well-publicized crackdowns show China's general unease with Web access, Sussman reports. In February and March 2000, police in Shanghai and Beijing closed down dozens of Internet cafes for having "improper" licenses. In May, the government shut down a financial Website for 15 days due to a published article the government considered damaging to its image.
Sussman finds the latter example, which involved the China Finance Information Network Website, particularly revealing. "This is a perfect example of how they're trying to get it both ways," he says. "When you're dealing with finance, you have to have accurate information. And accurate information can be 'damaging to the government's image'."
The government has also punished individuals who use the Net in ways it deems inappropriate. In March 1998, Shanghai businessman Lin Hai was arrested for supplying 30,000 email addresses to VIP Reference, and was jailed for over a year. Just prior to the 11th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, Huang Qi--who operated www.6-4tianwang.com, a Website that commemorates the June 4, 1989 killings--was arrested on charges of "subverting state power".
Huang's Website included a message board where people could post information about friends and relatives who have been missing since the crackdown, and this infuriated authorities, according to Long. "If you're running a Website in China, it's your responsibility to remove politically sensitive messages written by visitors," Long says. "If you don't, the police will come after you--it happens all the time."
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