Boston Globe Reports on China's Censorship of the Internet (Excerpt)

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist,

9/16/2002

[...]

Last week's report that Chinese citizens were barred from using Google (www.google.com), the world's most popular Internet search service, is just a hint of what China's rulers are up to.

According to a new report from the RAND Corporation, China's Internet censorship strategy uses everything from sophisticated digital filters to old-fashioned thuggery to keep the Internet in its place.

[...]

Even though the Chinese censors are deploying some very sophisticated technology, their best weapon appears to be what Mulvenon calls ''low-tech Leninism'' - the shrewd application of traditional government power.

Despite China's rapid economic growth, most people there are still far too poor to afford their own computers. So they do their Web surfing at public cybercafes. But all such cafes need a license, and that license requires them to keep an eye on what their customers are doing. Cafe owners who want to stay in business peer over the shoulders of customers, looking out for
everything from smutty pictures to subversive political messages.

The same tactic applies to the providers of home Internet services. According to the Rand report, Chinese ISPs employ teams of ''big mamas'' who roam the chat rooms and bulletin boards in search of forbidden information. Even American companies aren't immune: Yahoo has agreed to comply with the censorship rules as a condition for setting up shop in China.

[...]

Since the government controls all the Internet connections, it's easy for them to install specially-programmed routers and filters, the kind that stopped Chinese users from accessing Google last week.

By the way, why did they block Google? It's just an all-purpose Internet search service. Why would it bug the Chinese government so much?

Run a Google search and you'll find out. The results will include a link that reads ''Cached.'' This will lead you to a perfect image of the Web page from the last time Google updated its index, an image stored on Google's own servers.

A Chinese Web surfer in search of sites run by the banned Falun Gong movement will be blocked. But if he goes to Google and types ''Falun Gong,'' he can click on the cached results and read the pages anyhow. Mulvenon says that the Chinese figured this out, and that's why they killed Google access.

Mulvenon's friends in China tell him that, while Google has been reactivated, the cached pages feature is still blocked. That would take some pretty fancy digital footwork, but Mulvenon thinks the Chinese government is up to it.

Jim Barnett, CEO of rival search engine AltaVista, says his service is also being blocked. And while a Google spokeswoman said her company plans no changes in its service, Barnett says he's going to fight back.

''We would obviously attempt to get people access to our site through new and different URLs,'' he says. Changing the URL, or Internet address, should defeat the Chinese censors, but for how long? An hour? Barnett's also considering a system that would let Chinese users search AltaVista using e-mail messages, which are harder to block because of the sheer volume of e-mail traffic.

''We believe that censorship flies in the face of what we stand for as a company,'' says Barnett. Alas, censorship is exactly what China stands for as a government. [...]

Still, Mulvenon says he's a long-term optimist. Only about 40 million Chinese are online, out of 1.2 billion. This makes it relatively easy to censor the Net. But as the country becomes better educated and more affluent, he thinks the sheer volume of Internet traffic will force the electronic censors to give up and let a hundred flowers bloom.

[...] For now, the Internet in China is as free as the rest of the country - which is to say, it's as free as the thuggish old men of Beijing want it to be.

[...]

This story ran on page C4 of the Boston Globe on 9/16/2002.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/259/business/China_masters_art_of_Internet_censorship+.shtml

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