More on China Repression and Yahoo! Enablers
Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet Project at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley, and editor-in-chief of the China Digital Times, speaks out forcefully, and in my opinion a bit too optimistically (link requires subscription):
China’s Internet Censors Fight a Losing Battle
Almost overnight, the Internet has emerged as the single most important forum the Chinese people have to criticize government policies and participate in politics. This is the good news. The bad news is that China’s leaders have also noticed this phenomenon, and are doing everything in their power to reverse it. The really awful news is that Western Internet companies are only too happy to help the government.
On September 25, two powerful Chinese government agencies, the State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Information Industry, jointly issued an important legal document: Rules on the Administration of Internet News Information Services. Particularly aimed at online forums, Web logs and even SMS wireless services, these new regulations represent the latest wave of forceful measures that the Chinese government has undertaken in a desperate attempt to regain control over the Internet.
….. Significantly, the new rules include two additional categories of forbidden content left out of previously released regulations. One is the ban against “inciting illegal assemblies, associations, marches, demonstrations, or gatherings that disturb social order,” and the other targets “conducting activities in the name of an illegal civil organization.” This is an apparent attempt to eliminate netizens’ capacity to organize online. The massive anti-Japanese protests in some major Chinese cities this spring demonstrated the medium’s potential for spontaneous organization.
The most obvious feature of the new regulations is that they focus on “Internet news.” The following statement from the official news agency Xinhua makes the intention clear: “The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest.” The regulation defines “Internet news” as, “current events news information, and includes reporting and commentary relating to politics, economics, military affairs, foreign affairs, and social and public affairs, as well as reporting and commentary relating to fast-breaking social events.”
….. All major Internet Service Providers and Internet Content Providers in China have to hire people who do nothing but watch online information on their Web sites, and are ready to delete content considered “sensitive.” In addition to human censors, all Web site-hosting services have also installed keywords filtering software. Posts on politically sensitive topics, such as Falun Gong, human rights, democracy, and Taiwan independence are routinely filtered. A list obtained by the Berkeley China Internet Project last year found that over 1,000 words, including “dictatorship,” “truth,” and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums.
This regulation is backed up by real policing power. Since 2000, China’s police force has established Internet departments in more than 700 cities and provinces. The Chinese net police monitor Web sites and email for “heretical teachings or feudal superstitions” and information “harmful to the dignity or interests of the state.” They also have access to software which enables them to detect “subversive” key words in emails and downloads as well as to trace messages back to the computers from which they were sent.
….. But Chinese authorities do not only rely on the threat of police action or imprisonment, but also adopt more subtle approaches to “guide opinion” online. Propaganda agents work undercover online pretending to be ordinary netizens, monitoring Internet debate as well as “guiding” online discussions.
Ironically, while government agents hide their identity online, Chinese authorities have ordered that all users of blog-hosting services and other individual Web sites register their identity, even at Internet cafes. All of these control mechanisms have a clear goal: to hold individuals directly responsible for what appears on their Web sites.
….. grassroots media activities will continue to take place despite the new regulations. New-generation technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing and voice over IP phones (Skype is a brilliant example), will provide new communication platforms that can make it easier for users to bypass the censors’ control. The capacity of the government to implement these new regulations effectively, therefore, is very questionable. The many-to-many and emergent nature of the Internet empowers information users far more then censors.
In the short-term, the new rules may have a chilling effect on Chinese cyberspace. In the long term, however, the Chinese censors are fighting a losing battle. The deeper problem here is that the Chinese Communist Party itself is morally bankrupt and intellectually exhausted. More regulations will not make official propaganda any more attractive or credible to Chinese netizens. Undercover commentators, self-censorship by Web site hosts, and occasional harsh police action against political activists will not help China’s leaders gain legitimacy and trust either. Those in the West that helped trying to suppress speech may come to regret their decisions.
Perhaps Mr. Qiang knows better, but it seems to me that a morally bankrupt and intellectually exhausted leadership can hang on to power for a long time if it has a death grip on communications, and I don’t see how the new developments like Skype are any less controllable than other communication methods. But I do agree that if democracy triumphs in China, American enablers of the deposed regime will be remembered, and not fondly.
Meanwhile, a Yahoo! boycott site has been started. It has a petitition (which I signed), guidance on how to stop using the Yahoo! services, and much more. I encourage you to visit. I hope to be able to report large numbers of co-signers in a few weeks.
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Previous posts:
- China Repression with American Technology–On Smart Mobs, BBS, and SMS
- China Crackdown Continues: First Blogs, Now Internet News and Web Sites
- I Do Not “Yahoo!†Update: WaPo Weighs In
- I Do Not “Yahoo!†Follow-up
- I Do Not (and Will Not) Yahoo!
- The Bull in Oppressive China’s Shopping
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UPDATE: A defense of Yahoo! from one Jeremy Goldkorn (HT Instapundit):
If Yahoo! and the others packed their bags and left this country, freedom of expression would take a step backwards. By their investments in the Chinese Internet, foreign Internet companies have dramatically advanced freedom of expression for a quarter of the people on the planet.
Microsoft, Yahoo!, Cisco, Google etc. are forced into compromises when operating in China, but for every Shi Tao in jail, there are millions of people who have unprecedented access to information from around China and the outside world, thanks in part to those corporations.
This is why you almost never hear complaints about these companies from Chinese people, especially those who remember the pre-Internet age, when the average citizen could not even get hold of a copy of Time magazine.
No one is proposing these that these companies leave China. I’m suggesting that they not leave their principles and ethics behind when the enter China, or Mr. Goldkorn’s second paragraph cited above may have to be revised into past tense.
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