May/June
2010
China’s Internet Paradox
Will China’s Web, like its
larger economy, comfortably combine extraordinary growth with
government repression?
By David Talbot
On March 23, the day after Google pulled its search operations out
of mainland China, a woman who uses the online pseudonym Xiaomi arose
in her Shanghai apartment and sat down in her bedroom office for another
day of outwitting Internet censorship. She leads a confederation of
volunteer translators around the world who turn out Mandarin versions of
Western journalism and scholarly works that are banned on China’s
Internet–and that wouldn’t be available in Mandarin in any case. That
day, working in a communal Google Docs account, she and her fellow
volunteers completed translations of texts that ranged from a fresh New
York Times interview with Google cofounder Sergey Brin to "The
Limits of Authoritarian Resilience," a seven-year-old analysis of
China’s Communist Party from the Journal of Democracy.
What happened when Xiaomi hit "Post" reveals that the government’s
constraints have their limits. The pieces went live on a blog and a public Google Docs page. These links were broadcast to the
nearly 4,000 people who follow her on Twitter (as @xiaomi2020), the
1,170 more who follow her on Google Buzz, and others on five Chinese
Twitter clones. Although Blogspot and Twitter are blocked in China to
those without circumvention software, anybody in the country can open
the Google Docs page–at least for now. (The government did block Google
Docs for a time last year but relented after protests from companies
and universities.) Once posted, Xiaomi’s translations are often
reposted 10,000 times or more on blogs and bulletin-board-style
discussion sites. There, they can survive for various lengths of time,
though the hosting services–which are required to
self-censor–generally take them down. The total readership may be
orders of magnitude higher than the number of repostings, since each
post is presumably read by many people, some of whom also copy the
translations into group e-mails.
Xiaomi takes steps to preserve her anonymity and avoid run-ins with
the authorities. (Such encounters often
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start when
police summon someone to the local station to"drink tea"–the euphemism
for questioning designed to let people know they are being watched–and
can end with imprisonment.) She uses Gmail (which is encrypted and
hosted outside China) and technologies that make her computer’s Internet
Protocol address appear to come from the United States (the address
changes frequently to thwart blocking). When she needs to talk, she uses
the encrypted Internet voice service Skype–a version she installed in
the United States, not one available in China that was found to allow
surveillance.
What she achieves with the help of such tools is hardly the only
example of free speech and protest percolating through China’s censored
Internet. In recent years Internet-based campaigns–efforts that often
blossom on bulletin boards and blogs in hours or days–have pressured
the Chinese government to release prisoners, launch investigations into
scandals such as the kidnapping of boys conscripted into slave labor,
and imprison corrupt government officials. "The Internet has empowered
the Chinese people more than the combined effects of 30 years of
[economic] growth, urbanization, exports, and investments by foreign
firms," says Yasheng Huang, a China expert and professor of
international management at MIT’s Sloan School. "China may not have free
speech, but it has freer
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speech, because the Internet
has provided a platform for Chinese citizens to communicate with each
other." And that communication can include criticism of the government.
China’s attempts to suppress Internet speech have intensified. But
they have intensified partly because there’s so much more material
online–maybe overwhelmingly more–for the government to worry about.
China’s Internet, like its economy in general, is exploding in size and
complexity. The country now has a staggering 384 million Internet
users–nearly a quarter of the world total–plus 750 million
mobile-phone users, many of whom use those phones to access the Web.
That rapid growth of the network, coupled with the remarkable creativity
and boldness of its users, is shaping the Chinese Web at least as
powerfully as is government repression. "We underestimate the vitality
of the Chinese Internet," says Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of Global
Voices, a blogging advocacy group. "We hear it is censored and therefore
assume every page has a red background and text from the central
propaganda agency. We badly underestimate how vital and how interesting
some of those conversations can end up being. This is now the largest
Internet, bigger than that of the United States. Why do we have a blind
spot around this? We assume censored means ‘Dead. Lifeless. Artificial.’
What ‘censored’ actually
means is ‘really, really complicated.’ "
A Higher Firewall
The Chinese government operates the world’s most sophisticated
national Internet filtering system. Though often called the Great
Firewall, it is not one entity but, rather, a mix of strategies. Filters
at the ISP level block banned Western websites (including YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and the Guardian‘s site) and can
block websites whose URLs contain any of an ever-growing list of banned
keywords related to politically sensitive topics. The government stepped
up its efforts in 2009, especially before the 20th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4 and the 60th anniversary of China’s
National Day on October 1. The regime even unplugged the entire Net in
the Urumqi region to block reports of violent protests over the
ethnically motivated murders of migrant workers. Finally, the government
for a short time required that all computers be sold with porn
filtering software known as Green Dam preinstalled. (Faced with
international and domestic outrage when it emerged that the filter also
blocked political speech–and was buggy and insecure regardless of its
intended function–officials announced an indefinite delay.) It was a
hacking attack that Google said had targeted the Gmail accounts of human
rights activists that precipitated the company’s March decision to stop
censoring search results and shut down its site in mainland China.
To get around the blocks, some people use tools such as Ultrareach,
Dynaweb, and Tor (see "Dissent Made Safer," May/June 2009), which
enable them to connect to banned websites via proxy computers outside
the country. But government censors have increasingly been blocking the
proxies, too. And in truth, most Chinese Internet users don’t bother
with Western sites at all. Over the past decade, homegrown alternatives
to popular Western Web 2.0 sites have become extraordinarily popular.
Instead of Facebook, China has Douban, whose users are generally
anonymous and gravitate toward topics such as movie and book critiques
rather than personal news. Instead of YouTube, China has YouKu, which
naturally tilts toward Chinese topics. China’s bulletin-board sites–led
by QQ, the second
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most popular website in China and
the 10th most popular in the world–are teeming with debates over
current events. Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society at Harvard and a leading researcher on Internet
filtering and surveillance, says that sites hosted in China account for
about 95 percent of page views there. "Whereas a country like Turkey
will get upset at a video about the Armenian genocide and block
YouTube," he says, "China blocks YouTube but also gives people YouKu,
which is censored, but which they say is better anyway, natively in
Mandarin, and run by Chinese people."
The Chinese government allows these sites to flourish only because
they have agreed to censor themselves. But the forbidden topics are not
clearly defined, and the extent of the censorship varies. "In China
everyone knows there are hidden rules," says Isaac Mao, a Chinese
software engineer and venture capitalist based in Shanghai, who became
one of China’s first bloggers in 2002. Criticism of the regime,
promotion of democracy, and advocacy of human rights or Tibetan
independence are often censored; so is discussion of specific incidents
and scandals ranging from the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 to the
Sichuan earthquake scandal of 2008, in which the collapse of many
shoddily built school buildings contributed to the deaths of more than
5,000 children. The Chinese government
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increasingly imposes
heavy fines or shutdowns–or even jail time for principals–to make
local Web companies follow these implicit rules. A few years ago, a
government officer would "call your phone, ask you to delete some
article in one day, or in [a few] hours," says Huo Ju, a computer
programmer in Shanghai, who runs a technology blog that is blocked in
China. "The Chinese government didn’t close websites or companies. But
in 2009, many websites [were] closed. They also delete articles, and
they try to control opinion direction." Meanwhile, the government
rewards good behavior. Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese
Internet who is now a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center
for Information Technology Policy, wrote of attending a government event
in Beijing last November at which executives from 20 Chinese Internet
companies were awarded the 2009 China Internet Self-Discipline Award for
censoring themselves in the interest of "harmonious and healthy
Internet development." "China can use offline methods of control," says
Roberts. "At the end of the day, it is more effective to send government
agents to people’s doors than to filter the Net."
China’s users filter themselves, too. The Tianya.cn bulletin board,
with more than 35 million members, manages a kind of wiki-style
self-censorship. Posts are ruled on by communities of "board masters"
(ordinary users elected by other
members); if they cut a post, the poster can appeal to a higher-tier
editor in a complaint forum. A board master can be dismissed if enough
people complain. This in some sense mirrors the way Chinese society
works, and Donnie Dong, a Chinese lawyer and Internet scholar who is now
a fellow at the Berkman Center, says it is readily accepted. "The
reality is that the condition in China has changed the structure of the
Internet into something distinct," he says. He calls it the "Cinternet";
Xiaomi and some others call it the "Chinternet." Either way, says Dong,
"the law, including statutes and the ‘living law,’ is making and
changing the code."
Protests go viral
But this living law has neither checked the overall expansion of Web
access nor stanched the online activism that tests the limits of
censorship–especially on internal Chinese sites. The Chinese search
engine Baidu offers discussion forums that–although cleansed of
political topics–are extremely popular. One day last summer, an
anonymous member posted something on a Baidu forum devoted to the online
game World of Warcraft, and it became an Internet meme: Jia
Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. The cheeky,
mysterious sentence received seven million hits and 300,000 comments on
the first day. People built humorous dialogues around it; graphics made
it appear as if the command had been uttered by Barack Obama, Saddam
Hussein, or Chinese military officials posing for a formal Communist
Party portrait.
Then the goofy phenomenon took a sharp political turn. Around the
time the post originally appeared, a famous blogger named Guo Baofeng
was arrested for posting allegations of an official cover-up in the
brutal rape of a 25-year-old woman named Yan Xiaoling in Mawei, a
district in the city of Fuzhou. She later died of her injuries.
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Before his incarceration, Guo managed to squeeze off a couple of short
blog posts. "I have been arrested by Mawei police SOS," read one. Even
in repressive China, there’s no law against exhorting people to go home
to their mothers. Bloggers began calling on people to send postcards to
the Mawei police: Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to go home to
eat. Similar messages sprouted on bulletin-board sites. A few days
later, Guo was released; he later attributed his freedom to the
Internet-generated "postcard movement." The use of Web 2.0 in the Guo
case "is fascinating, and it is also revealing about some of the general
features of online social activism in China today," says Guobin Yang, a
sociologist and China Internet scholar at Columbia University.
"Compared with the student movement in 1989, where people had
large-scale gatherings, today’s activists work on special issues, like
calling for the release of a particular person or dealing with
corruption or environmental pollution through very creative means. Much
of this is happening on the Internet, with a lot of impact."
Sometimes the Chinese Web simply amplifies citizen outrage, forcing
government action. In 2007 a local newspaper in Henan province
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reported a kidnapping scandal: boys were being snatched to work as
slaves in brick kilns. The issue failed to excite the interest of
national authorities until a woman posted a letter about it on a local
online bulletin board. The letter was cross-posted to Tianya and went
viral, garnering 580,000 hits there and many more on other forums,
according to an analysis of the case by Yang. The attention prompted the
central government to investigate and prosecute two people. And in
Nanjing, amid anger over high housing prices, local bloggers broadcast
the fact that Zhou Jiugeng, a former director of a government
property-management bureau, was driving to work in a Cadillac and
wearing an expensive watch. The revelation led to an investigation–and
an 11-year prison sentence for Zhou, who was found to have been
accepting bribes.
Even lawyers and judges are testing the limits. Anne Cheung, a law
professor and Internet researcher at Hong Kong University, says she and
her colleagues are finding previously unheard-of criticism of the
regime. One lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, often blogs about the plight of citizens who try to lodge
legal complaints in Beijing but end up in secret jails. Some government
officials are
criticized by name. Criticism of the Chinese Communist Party used to
be "a sensitive area," Cheung says, "but now, somehow, the authorities
will tolerate that." In general, "if you have the courage to raise your
voice, then you may be able to get something out of the Internet and Web
2.0," she adds.
Internet Consensus?
A swiftly growing Chinese Internet; restrictions by the central
government; a degree of collusion with those restrictions among Web
companies and the public, so long as they are not onerous to business; a
calculation by the government that permits some dissidence: all this
might amount to an Internet version of the Beijing Consensus, a catchall
term for alternative models of economic development that take China’s
success as an example. The Chinese government has a long tradition of
managing dissent. And Cheung thinks the two trends–growing governmental
control of the Web on the one hand and online growth, creativity, and
activism on the other–will continue pushing and pulling on each other
for some time. Progress toward Internet openness "may be incremental,
not moving in a linear direction," she says. "I would say this is
consistent with Chinese style–loosening sometimes, but tightening
sometimes. You can’t really predict."
To break the stalemate and tear down the Great Firewall, some
activists and members of Congress have advocated that the West push on
two fronts. One is purely technological: make available far more proxy
computers, those neutral IP addresses in other countries from which
users in China can access an entirely open Internet. But that would be
costly–and in any case most Chinese use only Chinese sites, which are
subject to self-censorship, not network-level blocking. The second
tactic is to apply pressure through Western companies that are deeply
involved in the Chinese Internet–companies that provide the routers,
the filtering software (variations on the technology that filters
pornography and other content in other countries), and the PCs that
Chinese consumers buy. The Global Network Initiative (GNI), a consortium
of corporations, academics, and human rights groups that formed in
2008, is working on a voluntary code of
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corporate
conduct to support free speech and human rights, but to date only
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have signed on (the latter company after it
gave Chinese authorities data on activists named Li Zhi and Shi Tao,
resulting in their imprisonment). "It’s better to join the GNI before
you get stuck with a Yahoo case … rather than wait until they are
yelling at you in Congress and calling you moral pygmies," says
MacKinnon, a cofounder of the GNI. But as MacKinnon pointed out in a
recent blog post, these ideas go only so far; the only Chinese
anticensorship techniques that will work on a large scale will be ones
generated by the Chinese themselves. Zuckerman adds that well-meaning
Westerners would do well to at least become familiar with Chinese online
norms and customs. "Until we understand what Chinese users like and
want and use, it’s hard for us to understand how we would design
alternatives to censorship that are likely to succeed," he points out.
That’s where activists such as Xiaomi fit in. "Some people will
wonder who is doing this, and why," she said, speaking to me through her
secure Skype connection. Her motivations, she explained, are the same
as those that drew her, as an undergraduate in 1989, to the democracy
protests in Tiananmen Square. She recalls a Woodstock-like experience,
with people singing and falling in love as they camped out. She left on
May 28, 1989–one week before the crushing response by Chinese tanks and
soldiers–and went on to earn an MBA at a U.S. school and prosper
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as
a software consultant. "In my generation, most of us have done well. We
caught the opportunity of China’s booming economy," she said. "But
there are dreams that are not fulfilled yet. We had them for more than
20 years, and things are still getting even worse and not better."
Huang, of MIT, argues that the protestors of Tiananmen might never
have imagined seeing the criticisms of policies and officials that are
online today. "We should measure progress in China not by protests on
the streets and availability of news on protests, but by the involvement
of the Chinese citizens in policy discussions," Huang says. "By the
latter yardstick, China has made huge progress, thanks largely to the
Internet. The Internet is already changing China, and it will change the
country for the better in the future." China’s Internet, like its
society and economy as a whole, might move fitfully and incrementally
toward greater freedom. Because as activists like Xiaomi grow more
creative–and the Great Firewall grows more sophisticated–the Chinese
Internet is simply … growing. And even Xiaomi, who experiences the
Great Firewall firsthand and is less optimistic than Huang, believes
that the wall "eventually will fail."
David Talbot is Technology Review‘s Chief Correspondent.
