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The Hijacked Potential of China's Internet

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The Hijacked Potential of China's Internet THE HIJACKED POTENTIAL OF 2006 . 2, CHINA’S INTERNET NO RIGHTS FORUM BY HE QINGLIAN CHINA Following is a translated excerpt from an June 1995, the Internet was opened to the public.The Internet 31 updated and expanded version of He has developed very rapidly in China over the past few years and is now having a significant and visible impact on the economy, Qinglian’s groundbreaking study, Media culture, politics and education.According to a survey con- Control in China. HRIC will publish a full ducted by the China Internet Network Information Center English translation of the updated edition (CNNIC) in January 2006, China now has 110 million Inter- net users and 49.5 million computers with Internet access.2 In later this year. December 2004, the number of domain names and Web sites registered under the domain name “.cn” was 430,000 and In China, the government had a unique problem: how to 669,000, respectively.China had an international bandwidth keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive Web capacity measuring 74,429 megabits per second, and almost SPECIAL BOOK PREVIEW sites, now and forever. .To force compliance with govern- 59.9 million unique Internet protocol (IP) addresses had been ment objectives—to ensure that all pipes lead back to assigned to computers in China.3 Rome—they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to In purely quantitative terms, the Internet took off in China standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls as rapidly as in most countries.The Chinese government and on a national scale.According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco the Chinese people are proud of the fact that although China came through, developing a router device, integrator, and arrived at the atomic and electronic ages decades and perhaps firewall box specially designed for the government’s telecom even a century too late, it entered the Internet age at almost the monopoly. same time as America and Europe.4 —Ethan Gutmann: “Who Lost China’s Internet”1 Analyses of China’s Internet users reveal the following char- acteristics: When the Internet arrived in China in the 1990s, the interna- First, the absolute number of Chinese Internet users is high, tional community and Chinese advocates of democracy and but China’s 110 million Internet users comprise less than 8.5 freedom were full of hope and confidence that it would break percent of the total population of 1.3 billion. In this respect, government news censorship and promote China’s democrati- China lags far behind developed countries, and even behind zation. But cold reality has shattered this myth.The Chinese Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Hong Kong’s 3.3 million regime has hijacked the Internet and made a travesty of what Internet users represent 51 percent of the population, while ought to have been an engine for social progress. Macau’s 201,000 users represent 46 percent of the population. China’s Internet industry has indeed experienced extraordi- By the end of 2004, there were more than 13 million Internet narily rapid growth, but the Chinese government’s technologi- users in Taiwan, representing 56.52 percent of the island’s cal capabilities to control the Internet have advanced even population.5 faster.Assisted by several European and American high-tech Second, the Internet has developed in an extremely unbal- companies, the Chinese government initially built a firewall anced way throughout China. In economically developed and then spent a huge amount of money on the Golden Shield cities, the number of Internet users is high, but in underdevel- Project, the world’s biggest cyber police force and the largest oped areas, it is much lower.This points to regional differences and most advanced Internet control system.This sophisticated in China, not only in terms of economic development, but also system enables it to defend its autocratic rule very effectively. in the spread and availability of information as well as in polit- Press Experts predict that by 2008, China will have become the ical development. world’s largest and most intrusive police state. Third, because news is censored in China, news outlets are subject to all sorts of restraints and there is a uniform source of The development of the Internet in China news.Apart from a small number of powerfully placed Internet The PRC officially joined the Internet on March 20, 1994. In content providers (ICPs) and Internet traditional content Photo: Associated providers (ITCPs), most Web sites and portals that publish have introduced political terror and political violence into news provide little content of their own.That is why the Inter- cyberspace. net news landscape is shot through with stereotyped, plagia- Because the government’s propaganda departments lacked rized and empty political commentary. personnel with the requisite technical know-how,the state Fourth, Chinese Internet users are young, most of them security agencies were given the job of controlling and filtering under 35.This factor plays an important role in how online the Internet.To carry out this task, the Bureau of State Security news has been censored.According to communication theo- and the provincial and municipal state security bureaus in 1998 rists, a communication medium must reach 20 percent of the began retiring older personnel and recruiting large numbers of population to be considered part of the mass media. For online university students and graduate students to man a new cyber news to reach 20 percent of the population, there would have police force. Most of the new cyber-police are computer science to be 260 million Internet users in China.6 Given China’s level graduates with computing and Internet skills.The main task of of economic development and the rural population’s low level the cyber police is to inspect and control the Internet.They con- of education, this goal will not be attained anytime soon. tinuously search Web sites and critical nodes within Web sites (particularly online discussion forums) and block or shut them People under 30 do not demand the same down whenever they come across content the government dis- approves of, including potential state secrets, “anti-Party and types of news as the previous generation; anti-socialist speech” and criticism of the country’s leadership. they are mainly interested in entertainment The cyber police employ different censoring methods and sports. depending on whether Web sites are located in China or abroad, or whether they are owned by a work unit or an indi- vidual.When forbidden content appears on a Chinese Web site, The relative youth of Chinese Internet users also determines the cyber police can quickly ascertain where the site is located their political preferences.After the Tiananmen Incident,the and who owns it and send a secret e-mail warning to the site Chinese government reverted to the Maoist era ideological managers instructing them to find out who posted the content. strategy of defaming Western democratic values.As a result, the If the warning is not heeded, the police inform the Web site’s under-30 age group grew up after 1989 on a steady diet of local public security bureau to send police officers to threaten official ideology,propaganda and indoctrination, and now has the culprit.They can also employ technical means to shut a seriously distorted view of Western concepts of democracy down the Web site’s host server.When forbidden content and freedom. People under 30 do not demand the same types appears on a Web site located abroad, Chinese cyber police of news as the previous generation; they are mainly interested have no way of blocking its host server, but they can block in entertainment and sports. Some young people post online access to its directory or modify Chinese Web pages linking to it. messages claiming that “As a scientific and technological In addition to monitoring and controlling online news and superpower,America controls the main Web portals and uses speech, the government achieves further control by means of a them to promote its hegemony.”This is by no means a minor- Web site registration system. Since the General Administration ity view among the young.7 of Press and Publication (GAPP) issued the Provisional Regula- Following rapid initial growth, China’s Internet industry is tions on the Administration of Electronic Publications8 in now going through a period of restructuring. Most middle- 1996, the government has repeatedly revised laws and regula- sized and small Web sites are struggling to stay in business, and tions to tame the “wild horse” that is the Internet. one after another is closing down. Only a small number of The first approach was to control domain names. In May major Web sites are able to survive. For Internet companies 1997, the State Council’s Information Office issued a set of operating in a cutthroat business environment, the govern- Guidelines on Disseminating News Overseas by Means of the ment’s censorship of online news and speech is insult added to Internet,9 which stipulated, “All news organizations that pub- injury.To the Chinese government, controlling the Internet is a lish news content on the Internet must go through the Central matter of life and death. Internet censorship may hold back eco- Committee’s foreign news information platform and may not nomic growth, but that is a price the regime considers worth use other channels to access the Internet. Under no circum- paying to protect itself. Economic growth means nothing to the stances may they access the Internet from overseas.” Communist Party if it comes at the price of losing power. But the Internet developed so fast that this rule had to be revised soon after it was laid down.
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