SPECIAL REPORT CHINA AND THE INTERNET April 6th 2013 A giant cage China.indd 1 22/03/2013 14:49 SPECIAL REPORT CHINA AND THE INTERNET A giant cage The internet was expected to help democratise China. Instead, it has enabled the authoritarian state to get a rmer grip, says Gady Epstein. But for how long? THIRTEEN YEARS AGO Bill Clinton, then America’s president, said that CONTENTS trying to control the internet in China would be like trying to nail Jell•O to the wall. At the time he seemed to be stating the obvious. By its nature 3 The machinery of control the web was widely dispersed, using so many channels that it could not Cat and mouse possibly be blocked. Rather, it seemed to have the capacity to open up the 5 Microblogs world to its users even in shut•in places. Just as earlier communications Small beginnings technologies may have helped topple dictatorships in the past (for exam• ple, the telegraph in Russia’s Bolshevik revolutions in 1917 and short• 6 The Great Firewall wave radio in the break•up of the Soviet Union in 1991), the internet The art of concealment would surely erode China’s authoritarian state. Vastly increased access 8 E•commerce to information and the ability to communicate easily with like•minded Ours, all ours people round the globe would endow its users with asymmetric power, diluting the might of the state and acting as a force for democracy. 10 Cyber•hacking Those expectations have been confounded. Not only has Chinese Masters of the authoritarian rule survived the internet, but the state has shown great cyber­universe skill in bending the technology to its own purposes, enabling it to exer• 12 Internet controls in other cise better control of its own society and setting an example for other re• countries pressive regimes. China’s party•state has deployed an army of cyber•po• To each their own lice, hardware engineers, software developers, web monitors and paid online propagandists to watch, lter, censor and guide Chinese internet 12 Assessing the e ects users. Chinese private internet companies, many of them clones of West• A curse disguised as a ern ones, have been allowed to ourish so long as they do not deviate blessing? from the party line. 13 Turning o the internet If this special report were about the internet in any Western coun• Thou shalt not kill try, it would have little to say about the role of the government; instead, it would focus on the companies thriving on the internet, speculate about which industries would be disrupted next and look at the way the web is changing individuals’ lives. Such things are of interest in China too, but this report concentrates on the part played by the government because that is the most extraordinary thing about the internet there. The Chinese government has spent a huge amount of e ort on making sure that its in• ternet is di erent, not just that freedom of expression is limited but also that the industry that is built around it serves national goals as well as commercial ones. Walls have ears Ironically, the rst e•mail from China, sent to an international aca• A list of sources is at demic network on September 14th 1987, proclaimed proudly: Across the Economist.com/specialreports Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world. Yet within China’s An audio interview with borders the Communist Party has systematically put in place projects the author is at such as the Great Firewall, which keeps out undesirable foreign web• Economist.com/audiovideo/ sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and Golden Shield, which 1 specialreports The Economist April 6th 2013 1 SPECIAL REPORT CHINA AND THE INTERNET 1,400 net to ourish has been an important part HEILONGJIANG of building a better cage. But it is constant• ly watched over and manipulated. A I JILIN L Sometimes the authorities’ e orts at O 1,200 G controlling it are absurd, even ridiculous, O N XINJIANG M LIAONING R BEIJING but the joke is on the users. Government N E I N Beijing agencies across the country have invested TIANJIN HEBEI heavily in software to track and analyse NINGXIA SHANXI SHANDONG 1,000 QINGHAI online behaviour, both to gauge public GANSU JIANGSU opinion and to contain threats before they HENAN T IBET SHAANXI Shanghai spread, and the authorities deal ruthlessly ANHUI SHANGHAI SICHUAN HUBEI 800 with those who break the rules. In 2009 ZHEJIANG CHONGQING JIANGXI Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese writer, was sen• N A tenced to 11 years in prison for co•writing Internet penetration HUNAN I GUIZHOU J U rate, 2011-12, % F an online manifesto calling for an end to >60 YUNNAN NG 600 GDO authoritarian rule and asking for signa• Total,% GUANGXI AN 50-60 GU tures in support. At the time few in China 40-49.9 Hong Kong 42.1 had heard of Mr Liu, a much•jailed de• 30-39.9 HAINAN mocracy activist, and not many saw the <30 400 declaration. He became famous outside China when he was awarded the Nobel Number of users peace prize in 2010 but is still largely un• known within the country because of m 200 United States strict censorship (his name is among a European Union huge and growing number of sensitive China keywords which are blocked online). nil Rest of world 0 Also in 2009, after riots in Xinjiang, a 1995 2000 05 10 12 remote north•western region, the authori• Sources: CNNIC; World Bank; ITU ties shut o the area’s internet from both the rest of China and from the world. By ipping an internet kill switch, they iso• 2 monitors activities within China. It has also worked closely with lated the area for almost a year. And in March 2012, when social trusted domestic internet companies such as Baidu (a search en• media carried rumours of an attempted coup in Beijing, the gov• gine), Tencent (an internet•services portal), Renren (China’s lead• ernment temporarily shut down some of the internet’s micro• ing clone of Facebook) and Sina, an online media company that blogging services and detained six people. includes Weibo, a Twitter•like microblogging service. Of all these newcomers, microblogging has had much the Wobbling Jell•O biggest impact on everyday life in China. It has allowed the Will the Chinese state be able to go on controlling, manipu• spread of news and views in ways that were not previously pos• lating and hacking the internet indenitely? There are reasons to sible, penetrating almost every internet•connected home in Chi• think it will not. When Mr Clinton made his famous remark na. The authorities, having blocked Twitter and Facebook early about nailing Jell•O to the wall, only 20m people in China were on, allowed Chinese microblogs and social•media services to de• online. Now the cage strains to hold in excess of 560m, almost as velop as trusted and controlled alternatives. They grew expo• many as the online population of North America and Europe nentially, far beyond anything that Twitter achieved in the Chi• combined. The fastest growth in internet use is in China’s poorer, nese market. more rural provinces, partly because of a surge in users connect• Google, the West’s foremost search company, hesitantly ing via mobile devices, which now outnumber those connecting tried to play by China’s rules for a while, introducing a self•cen• from computers. The internet is no longer conned to an urban, sored search engine there in 2006, but eventually withdrew that educated and relatively well•o public. Most farmers are getting service in 2010, not so much because of the restrictions imposed online to listen to music, play mobile games and check the on it but because it was being hacked by the Chinese. China’s weather, not blog dissent. But even casual users can be drawn cyber•hackers continue routinely to break into the e•mails of dis• into political debates online, and the internet is one place where sidents as well as into the computer systems of foreign media people can speak their minds and criticise the government rela• that report sensitive stories on China’s leaders. They have recent• tively freely. ly made headlines by stealing the technology of American de• In private they have always grumbled, and families at their fence rms and probing critical American infrastructure for vul• dinner tables have sco ed at the propaganda served up on state• nerabilities. Numerous hacking attacks abroad have pur• run television. But being able to express diverging views collec• portedly provided Chinese rms with sensitive commercial tively online is new. Millions of users are low•grade subversives, information and given the People’s Liberation Army valuable in• chipping away at the imposing edice of the party•state with hu• sights into other countries’ defence apparatus. mour, outrage and rueful cynicism. Only those deemed to be The party has achieved something few had thought possi• threatening the stateon a very broad denition that can include ble: the construction of a distinct national internet. The Chinese being critical of a leader, or airing some grievanceare singled internet resembles a fenced•o playground with paternalistic out for punishment. guards. Like the internet that much of the rest of the world en• Sometimes online complaints do produce results, swiftly joys, it is messy and unruly, o ering diversions such as games, bringing o enders to book. When an army political commissar shopping and much more. Allowing a distinctly Chinese inter• got abusive with a ight attendant, she posted photographs of 1 2 The Economist April 6th 2013 SPECIAL REPORT CHINA AND THE INTERNET 2 the incident.