The Internet in China

An excerpt from Perry Link's fascinating review of He Qunglian's book 'How
the Chinese Government Controls the Media'. The below is reproduced without
permission but with respect. It appeared in the February 24, 2005 issue of
The New York Review of Books (pages 38-39) – http://nybooks.com

ja
http://vispo.com

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The Internet, which has grown explosively in China, has become the biggest
obstacle to the government's control of information. In 1997 the country
had about 620,000 Internet users; today there are about 80 million, whether
they use home computiers or frequent the "Internet cafes" on the streets.
E-mail–flexible, fast, and unorganized–is the most frustrating medium the
Party has ever confronted.

But if the problem has been large for Chinese officials, so are their
efforts to control it. In 1996 the government started issuing proclamations
forbidding the use of the Internet to circulate information objectionable to
the regime, but it soon realized that this was futile. He Qinglian describes
how, beginning in 1998, the Ministry of State Security recruited a great
many young university graduates with high-tech skills to monitor and control
the Internet. Today there are thousands of them surfing the Web in search of
anti-Party opinions. Anmesty International has estimated that there are some
30,000 but no one outside the system knows for sure. When they find
something they want to suppress they have a number of choices. If the
offending Web site is foreign, they can block it, either temporarily or
permanently, and sometimes can edit it electronically. If the Web site is
domestic, they can issue a warning or they can close it down, a practice
more common during "sevsitive periods" like the run-up to a Party congress
or to an anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. In early 2003, during
the SARS cover-up, forty-two of Google's one hundred most frequently visited
sites were blocked in China.

If electronic methods fail, the police can be sent to deal with the
offending blogger. Then the sanctions become essentially the same as for
work in print: "rectifications," fines, confiscation of money and equipment,
closings, and in extreme cases, arrests. Of sixty-nine people throughout
the world listed by Reporters Without Borders as in jail for using the
Internet, sixty one are in China, where most of them have been charged with
"subversion" and given sentences ranging from two to twelve years. Four
Internet offenders, all from Falun Gong, have died in prison.

And yet even these measures have not been enough to control the Web.
Electronic cat-and-mouse games continue between bloggers and the regime. In
recent months the government has added psychological weapons to its offense
in an effort to induce Web users to srart policing one another and, by
generating fear, to make people censor themselves.

In Auguest 2002 new regulations required that Web publishers in China have
organizations, bylaws, and an editorial system in which they assign a
"responsible editor" to supervise each article they publish. In form these
rules only bring Web publishers into line with print and other publishers.
But the real intent was to ban personal Web sites. Now at least two people,
and usually more, must be collectively accountable for what any one of them
does on the Internet, and hence each has an incentive to watch the others
and prevent their mistakes. Similar techniques of enforcing collective
responsibility have ancient roots in China, and were much used during the
Mao years.

Moreover, Web sites are being held responsible not only for their own
postings but those of all chat room visitors; managers are therefore obliged
to stand in for the government, monitoring and censoring what gets posted.
Managers of Internet cafes can be punished if any of their customers sends
or receives illicit messages. During the "sensitive periods," cafes and Web
sites thus ask their visitors to be careful, to "please cooperate," and so
on. He Qinglian points out that this system tends to encourage a perverse
assumption in the minds of all concerned, namely, that if someone does "make
a mistake" and precipitate a shutdown, the calamity is the fault of that
person, not the government.

In early 2004 the government set up a new chinese Center for Informing on
Illegal and Harmful Information, which hugely expanded the possibilities for
anyone, anywhere, to report bad thinking to the Chinese police by sending an
email to [email protected] ( net.china.cn/chinese/index.htm ). "Jubao"
means "informing". If you want to attack your enemies, however, it is
illegal to do so anonymously. Another recent rule for the Chinese Web says
that surfers must use their real names, a requirement that naturally
strengthens the Web user's "self-discipline". In March 2003 the government
asked Internet service providers in China to sign on voluntarily to a
"Public Pledge of Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry". About
three hundred providers, Yahoo among them, did so.

In her conclusion He Qinglian touches on the most sensitive question of all
when she analyzes the term "state security," which is used by the regime to
justify its efforts to block news from reaching the public. The regime also
claims that popular elections above the village level will not work because
the suzhi (quality, character) of the people is too low. The masses are
ignorant, and would be too easily swayed by passion or bias. Therefore, they
coninue, we, the masters of the regime, have to be in control. The logic is
not only humiliating to the Chinese people but oddly circular: we must, the
regime says, run things in our own repressive way because the people are
ignorant, and the people are ignorant in large part because we keep them
from being informed. The result is described as "stability". But the lesson
of He Qinglian's book is that it is the security of the dictatorial system
itself that is at stake.

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Concerning He Qinglian's work, see
http://www.google.com/search?q=He+Qinglian