Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
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The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China had made a law of Internet censorship in mainland China. To accordance with this law, several regulations were made by the Chinese government, and a censorship system is implemented variously by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. This law is not applied to Special Administrative Regions ,such as Hong Kong and Macau.
The firewall part of the system is known outside mainland China as the Great Firewall of China (in reference both to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China). The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways. The system also selectively engages in DNS poisoning when particularly objectionable sites (such as the BBC) are requested. The government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical.
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Extent
Foreign sites
This firewall is largely ineffective at preventing the flow of information and is rather easily circumvented by determined parties by using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and ssh connections to outside mainland China are not blocked, so circumventing all of the censorship and monitoring features of the Great Firewall of China is trivial for those who have these secure connection methods available to them. For a few weeks in 2002, the Chinese government attempted to block Google, but this block was quickly removed, though some features on Google (such as Google Cache) remain erratic.
Research into the Chinese Internet censorship has shown that blocked websites include:
- Websites with pornographic content
- News from many foreign sources, especially websites which include forums
- Information about Tibet independence
- Information about Falun Gong
- Some websites based in Taiwan
- Some websites based in Hong Kong, or with content about Hong Kong (e.g. http://hk.yahoo.com is blocked)
- Overseas Chinese websites such as http://chinese-school.netfirms.com
Wikimedia sites have so far been blocked twice. See History of Wikipedia.
Search engines
One part of the block is to disallow certain terms from being used on search engines. These search engines include both international ones (e.g. Google and Yahoo!) as well as domestic ones (e.g. Baidu). Attempting to search for such a term results in a The page cannot be displayed error. Repeatedly attempting to search for blocked terms results in the entire search engine being blocked, presumably from the same IP address.
In general, if a term is blocked, then any sequence containing the term is also blocked. For example, since 法轮 (falun, or "dharma chakra") is blocked, so is 法轮功 (Falun Gong) and 转法轮 ("Turning dharma chakra").
Other methods
Although blocking foreign sites has received much attention in the West, this is actually only a part of the Chinese effort to censor the Internet. Although the government rarely practice this, much more effective is the ability to censor content providers within China, as the government can physically seize any website and its operators.
Although the government does not have the physical resources to monitor all Internet chat rooms and forums, the threat of being shut down has caused internet content providers to employ internal staff, colloquially known as "big mamas", who stop and remove forum comments which may be politically sensitive.
However, Internet content providers have adopted some counterstrategies. One is to go forth posting political sensitive stories and removing them only when the government complains. In the hours or days in which the story is available online, people read it, and by the time the story is taken down, the information is already public. One notable case in which this occurred was in response to a school explosion in 2001, when local officials tried to suppress the fact the explosion resulted from children illegally producing fireworks. By the time local officials forced the story to be removed from the Internet, the news had already been widely disseminated.
In addition, Internet content providers often replace censored forum comments with white space which allows the reader to know that comments critical of the authorities had been submitted, and often to guess what they must have been.
Contrary to general Western perceptions, Internet cafes are not generally inhabited by political subversives, but are frequented by teenagers playing online games against each other or visiting chat-rooms.
Implementation
The banning appears to be mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc, with some sites being blocked and similar sites being allowed. The blocks are often lifted for special occasions. One example was the New York Times which was unblocked when reporters in a private interview with Jiang Zemin specifically asked about the block and he replied that he would look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai during 2001, normally-blocked media sources such as CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post suddenly became accessible.
Chinese agencies frequently issue regulations about the Internet, but these are often not enforced or are ignored. One major problem in enforcement is determining who has jurisdiction over the Internet, causing many bureaucratic turf battles within the Chinese government among various ministries and between central and local officials. The State Council Information Office has the mandate to regulate the Internet, but other security agencies in China have a say as well.
Some legal scholars have pointed out that the frequency at which the Chinese government issues new regulations on the Internet is a symptom of their ineffectiveness because the new regulations never make reference to the previous set of regulations, which appear to have been forgotten.
Role of foreign companies
One controversial issue is whether foreign companies should supply equipment which assists in the blocking of sites to the Chinese government. Some argue that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship, while others argue that equipment being supplied is standard Internet infrastructure equipment and that providing this sort of equipment actually aids the flow of information. Without the equipment, the Chinese government would not develop the Internet at all. A similar dilemma faces foreign content providers such as Yahoo! and AOL who must abide by Chinese government wishes, including having internal content monitors, in order to be able to operate within China. Aslo to accordance with Chinese laws, Microsoft began to censor the content of its blog service MSN space[1] (http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/14/technology/microsoft_china.reut/).
Sites that host software that can be used to circumvent the censorship, such as Freenet and Peek-a-Booty, are also banned. (For some time, this included the entire open source software repository at SourceForge, as it hosts the Freenet project, among thousands of others.)
Recent developments
On July 11, 2003, the PRC government granted licenses to open Internet cafe chains. The licenses were awarded to 10 firms, including three affiliated to the Chinese Ministry of Culture: China Audio-Visual Publishing House, which plans to set up 50,000 cafes in 40 cities in three years, the China Cultural Relics Information Center and the China National Library. A fourth operator, China Youth Net, is affiliated with the politically powerful Central Committee of China Youth League. The other six include state-owned telecoms operators such as China United Telecommunications Corporation, parent of China Unicom Ltd, Great Wall Broadband Network Service Co Ltd, or Internet service providers such as www.readchina.com, which belongs to Read Investment Holdings Co., a high-tech conglomerate founded in 1988 which has annual revenues of 10 billion yuan. Business analysts and foreign internet operators regard the licenses as intended to clamp down on information deemed harmful to the PRC government.
Liberalization of sexually oriented content
Although restrictions on political information remain as strong as ever, several sexually oriented blogs began appearing in early 2004. Women using the web aliases Muzi Mei (木子美) and Zhuying Qingtong (竹影青瞳) wrote online diaries of their sex lives and became minor celebrities. This was widely reported and criticized in Chinese news media, but has not resulted in any real crackdown as of yet. This has coincided with an artistic nude photography fad (including a self-published book by dancer Tang Jiali) and the appearance of pictures of minimally clad women or even topless photos in a few Chinese newspapers, magazines and websites. It is too soon to tell how far this trend will go, but increasingly, censorship is applicable to political content rather than to sexuality.
Efforts at breaking through
It was common in the past to use Google's cache feature to view blocked websites. However, this feature of Google seems to be under some level of blocking, as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites. Currently the block is mostly circumvented by using proxy servers outside the firewall, and is not difficult to carry out for those determined to do so. Some well-known proxy servers have also been blocked.
As Falun Gong websites are generally inaccessible from mainland China, practitioners have launched a company named UltraReach Internet Corp (http://www.ultrareach.com) and developed a software named UltraSurf to enable people in China to access restricted web sites via Internet Explorer without being detected.
Other techniques used include Freenet, a peer-to-peer distributed data store allowing members to anonymously send or retrieve information, TriangleBoy, and by using overseas proxy servers.
See also
- Internet in the People's Republic of China
- Media in the People's Republic of China
- Guo Liang
- History of Wikipedia
- Internet censorship
- International Freedom of Expression eXchange - monitors Internet censorship in China (http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/147/)
- YTHT
- SMTH BBS
External links
- Decision of the Standing Committee of NPC Regarding the Safeguarding of Internet Security (http://www.chinaeclaw.com/english/readArticle.asp?id=2386) , Adopted on 28 December 2000 by the 19 Session of the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress
- Chinese Laws and Regulations Regarding Internet (http://www.chinaeclaw.com/english/showCategory.asp?Code=022)
- Real-Time Testing of Internet Filtering in China (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/)
- BBC story on the Great Firewall of China (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2234154.stm)
- CBS story on Chinese Internet censorship (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/03/tech/main531567.shtml)
- Internet Censorship in China (http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/Internet-censorship.html) - An article
- Amnesty International report on Chinese state censorship of the Internet (http://web.amnesty.org/web/content.nsf/pages/gbr_china_internet)
- HOWTO bypass Internet Censorship (http://www.zensur.freerk.com/)
- Cherry, Steven (2005). "The Net Effect: As China's Internet gets a much-needed makeover, will the new network promote freedom or curtail it? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China)". IEEE Spectrum Online (2005).
- Tao, Wenzhao (2001). "Censorship and protest: The regulation of BBS in China People Daily (http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_1/tao/index.html)". First Monday, v.6, n.1 (January 2001).
- Walton, Greg. China's Golden Shield (http://www.ichrdd.ca/english/commdoc/publications/globalization/goldenMenu.html). International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2001.
- Qiu, Jack Linchuan (2000). "Virtual censorship in China: Keeping the gate between the cyberspaces (http://www.ijclp.org/4_2000/pdf/ijclp_webdoc_1_4_2000.pdf)". International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, v.4, Winter 1999/2000. (PDF file)
- Tsui, Lokman (2001). "Big Mama is Watching You: Internet Control by the Chinese government (http://www.lokman.nu/thesis)". Unpublished MA thesis, University of Leiden.
- Sinclair, Greg. The Internet In China: Information Revolution or Authoritarian Solution?also (http://www.geocities.com/gelaige79/intchin.htm) available as Word Doc (http://www.geocities.com/gelaige79/intchin.doc) or Adobe Portable Document Format (http://www.geocities.com/gelaige79/intchin.pdf)
- freenet china (http://www.freenet-china.org/) Chinese News Net
- Olympic Watch (Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games in a Free and Democratic Country) on censorship in China (http://www.olympicwatch.org/topics.php?id=7)