East-West Center/US Asia Pacific Council 7th Annual Washington Conference U.S.-Asia Pacific Relations: Transitions In a New Era May 6, 2010 “Democracy, Activism, and Information Flows” Moderator: to not only find the news Dr. Kenneth Lieberthal, Director, John L. Thornton and make sure that I cov- China Center, The Brookings Institution ered it in an objective Speakers: way, but also protect the Ms. Audra Ang, International Nieman Fellow, safety of the people I Harvard University and Correspondent, The Associated interviewed. Press (China) So what I’m going to Dr. James Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow, do is give you a simple Technology and Public Policy Program, Center for overview of the Internet Strategic and International Studies in China, how the govern- Dr. Irene S. Wu, Director of Research, International ment censors things, and Bureau, Federal Communications Commission how citizens are reacting. Ms. Audra Ang, International Nieman This information is Fellow, Harvard University, and LIEBERTHAL: This panel takes up a subject that is compiled from research Correspondent, The Associated Press of rapidly growing importance. That is the digital trans- done by people far more (China) mission of information, which affects everything from the knowledgeable about the nature of political organization to human rights, personal subject that I am. privacy, commercial security, and national security. [Audra Ang’s Power Point presentation is available at I am delighted this afternoon to have a panel that will http://www.eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/resources/wash- explore substantial chunks of that broad continuum. Our ington/usapc/uap_panel.ppt] first speaker is Audra Ang. She is an International At the end of 2009, there were 384 million Internet Nieman Fellow, currently at Harvard University as well users in China. It’s probably up to 400 million by now. as a correspondent with the Associated Press, based in The top three uses are online music, online news, and China. search engines. In terms of age groups, Internet use is The two broad issues I’ve asked her to address are (1) dominated by students in the ten to 19 year range. the role of the Internet and new media in her own report- China has one of the largest and most sophisticated ing about dissidents and other sensitive topics and (2) filtering systems in the world and it has gone to great how the availability of the Internet and other new media lengths to limit access to any content that might be poten- affects strategies pursued by those dissidents and the tially critical of the government or undermine the state’s ability of people to learn about sensitive topics. Her control of social stability. remarks are remarks are on background and should not One example is the Green Dam Youth Escort, which be cited anywhere. China tried to put in place last year. Beijing wanted Web filtering software to be installed into every new PC ANG: As Ken said, I was a general news reporter for shipped into China. The excuse was that the government the AP in Beijing for seven years. In my reporting, I had continued on page two continued from page one Finally, I would say that when you are in this envi- was trying to block children from accessing porn, but in ronment it is easy to become psychologically affected. So reality it blocked a lot more content. There was a great Internet users become worried about getting caught or deal of protest and eventually this software was shelved. being penalized for what they’re doing and so they start Some of the basic methods that the government uses self-censoring. to control what people see on the Internet includes filter- ing, in which the network administrator blocks access to Type of Blocked Content specified Web pages. The administrator monitors domain names, Internet addresses, and so forth, with an eye What’s blocked? I think all of you know this. The toward specific keywords or phrases. basic things like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and blogs. Search engines also are controlled for topics like Tibet, Methods of Censorship Falun Gong, Charter 08, and so forth. In the past few years, the hot word has become fan The second method is the deletion and removal of qiang, which loosely translates to scaling the Great content. We had to deal with this a lot because we start- Firewall. There are several ways that Chinese Internet ing to look at blogs, chat rooms, and other new media to users have begun doing this. Some people, such as look for potential stories. What would happen is that we myself, have begun to use proxy servers, which link your would find something potentially newsworthy, but then computer to an overseas server so that you can get access within an hour would be gone. So I started to do screen- to whatever you want to look at. shots or print out what we found so that even if I had to When I went home to use my computer, which was look at it a few hours later to write a story, I’d have a linked to a local server, I had to use a proxy called record of it. Hotspot just to access Facebook. Another censorship method involves deploying peo- There also are anonymity networks, Tor being one of ple to track online activity. They monitor what goes on in them. It bounces communications around the world, so cyber-cafes or enter chat rooms and blogs just to keep that people can’t really pin down your location or pin track of what’s happening. down exactly what you’re looking at. In addition, the government has been using cyber- Another response has been informal gatherings of attacks in an effort to control what appears on the bloggers and journalists, where they teach each other how to use these circumnavigation tools. We are begin- ning to see more and more people exchanging knowledge In this environment, it is easy to become and of ideas about how get around government censor- psychologically affected and begin to self- ship as they become more discontented. As I said earlier, there’s also a group of people that censor your Internet use have begun to download articles, photos, and videos on potentially sensitive subjects in case the government takes them off the Internet. They later repost this subject matter Internet. Many of these attacks have been on sites run by on other sites or they send it to their friends via e-mail human rights activists. Basically, they flood the site and and other social networks. overwhelm the servers and rendering the sites inaccessi- And then there are now loosely organized groups, ble. who research China’s censorship mechanisms and they Similarly, the government has begun to hack into the uncover companies and organizations that help build the email accounts of human rights activists, exiles, dissi- the government’s censorship system. dents, and now journalists and academics. That has two consequences: first, those affected are left without email Word Plays to Beat Censors accounts, which is one of the main ways they communi- cate; and second, their sources may be endangered. Last of all, people are beginning to protest in a more The Chinese government has begun hiring people to fun way by playing on words. And I’m going to show write favorable comments about the government in blogs you a couple of examples of this later. and social networking sites. These people have been deri- This slide is Zeng Jinyan. She is the wife of Hu Jia, sively called the 50-Cent Party, because a lot of them get who is a famous activist. He was nominated for a Nobel paid to do this. A Hong Kong researcher last year deter- Peace Prize, and she won the Time Woman of the Year mined that the government is paying about 280,000 peo- award a few years ago. She’s pretty much under house ple to do this. In addition, there are volunteers, like arrest and gets followed everywhere by state security, so retired party members or college students who are part of this is her way of giving us a window into her life. the Communist Youth League, who are posting these favorable comments in blogs. continued on page three 2 7th Annual USAPC Conference continued from page two happy little song about grass mud horses, but the English This photo is one of the anti-censor word plays that subtitles—again, I apologize—give a very different mean- became very big. In Chinese the characters for “river ing. The video went viral for quite a while before the gov- crab” is he xie. But it also sounds like the words for “har- ernment censors got wind of it. monious.” Hu Jintao’s shtick is the harmonious society. So this is one way in which Internet users in China were [See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08 ] making fun of it. Jiang Zemin, the previous president, came up with LIEBERTHAL: There is a phrase that is familiar to something called the “three represents,” which, until anyone who has studied China that means, “The center today, I don’t really know what they are. And I asked reg- has its policies and the localities have their countermea- ular Chinese citizens and they don’t really know what the sures.” It sounds to me like the Internet censors have their three represents are either. But it’s called san ge dai biao, policies and the Internet users have their countermea- which sounds like “three (people) wearing watches.” sures. One of the issues we’ll want to discuss, inevitably, So basically, you have the river crab wearing three is whether a balance is emerging between the two in this watches.