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Internet censorship in China

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The People's Republic of China has set up a system of Internet censorship in Mainland China.

One part of this system is known outside 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 government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical.

Extent of block

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. 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:

  • News from many foreign sources, especially websites which include forums
  • Information about Tibet independence
  • Information about Falun Gong
  • Some websites based in Taiwan

Wikimedia sites have so far been blocked twice. See History of Wikipedia.

The banning appears to be uncoordinated and ad-hoc mostly, with some sites being blocked while other similar sites are 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 replied that he would look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai during 2001, normally blocked CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post were suddenly 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.

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. 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.

One controversial issue is whether Western companies should supply equipment to the Chinese government which assists in the blocking of sites. 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 Western 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.

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.)

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.

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 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 morality.

See also

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