Role of the Internet in China

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Excerpt: Opening a Public Sphere in China. By Larry Diamond. From an essay on Liberation Technology in the Journal of Democracy.

URL = http://irevolution.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/diamond-21-3.pdf


Text

Larry Diamond:


“The prevailing answer is no: China’s “Great Firewall” of Internet filtering and control prevents the rise of an independent public sphere online. Indeed, China’s policing of the Internet is extraordinary in both scope and sophistication. China now has the world’s largest population of Internet users—more than 380 million people (a number equal to 29 percent of the population, and a sixteen-fold increase since the year 2000). But it also has the world’s most extensive, “multilayered,” and sophisticated system “for censoring, monitoring, and controlling activities on the internet and mobile phones.”8 Connection to the international Internet is monopolized by a handful of state-run operators hemmed in by rigid constraints that produce in essence “a national intranet,” cut off from anything that might challenge the CCP’s monopoly on power.

Access to critical websites and online reporting is systematically blocked. Google has withdrawn from China in protest of censorship, while YouTube, Facebook, and Blogspot, among other widely used sites, are extensively blocked or obstructed. Chinese companies that provide search and networking services agree to even tighter self-censorship than do international companies. When protests erupt (as they did over Tibet in 2008, for instance) or other sensitive political moments approach, authorities preemptively close data centers and online forums. Now the party-state is also trying to eliminate anonymous communication and networking, by requiring registration of real names to blog or comment and by tightly controlling and monitoring cybercafés. Fifty-thousand Internet police prowl cyberspace removing “harmful content”—usually within 24 to 48 hours. Students are recruited to spy on their fellows. And the regime pays a quarter of a million online hacks (called “50-centers” because of the low piece rate they get) to post favorable comments about the partystate and report negative comments.

Such quasi-Orwellian control of cyberspace is only part of the story, however. There is simply too much communication and networking online (and via mobile phones) for the state to monitor and censor it all. Moreover, Chinese “netizens”—particularly the young who are growing up immersed in this technology—are inventive, determined, and cynical about official orthodoxy. Many constantly search for better techniques to circumvent cyber-censorship, and they quickly share what they learn. If most of China’s young Internet users are apolitical and cautious, they are also alienated from political authority and eagerly embrace modest forms of defiance, often turning on wordplay.

Recently, young Chinese bloggers have invented and extensively lauded a cartoon creature they call the “grass mud horse” (the name in Chinese is an obscene pun) as a vehicle for protest. This mythical equine, so the narrative goes, is a brave and intelligent animal whose habitat is threatened by encroaching “river crabs.” In Chinese, the name for these freshwater crustaceans (hexie) sounds very much like the word for Hu Jintao’s official governing philosophy of “harmony”—a label that critics see as little more than a euphemism for censorship and the suppression of criticism. Xiao Qiang, editor of China Digital Times, argues that the grass mud horse has become an icon of resistance to censorship. The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to unreasonable rule. But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.

In order to spread defiance, Chinese have a growing array of digital tools. Twitter has become one of the most potent means for political and social networking and the rapid dissemination of news, views, and withering satire. On April 22 at People’s University in Beijing, three human rights activists protested a speech by a well-known CCP propaganda official, Wu Hao. Showering him with small bills, they declared, “Wu Hao, wu mao!” (“Wu Hao is a fifty-center!”). Twitter flashed photographs of the episode across China, delighting millions of students who revel in mocking the outmoded substance, tortured logic, and painfully crude style of regime propagandists.

When Google announced in late March 2010 it was withdrawing its online search services from mainland China (after failing to resolve its conflict with the government over censorship and cyber-attacks), the Chinese Twitter-sphere lit up. Many Chinese were upset that Google would abandon them to the more pervasive censorship of the Chinese search-engine alternatives (such as Baidu), and they worried that the Great Firewall would block other services such as Google Scholar and Google Maps. Others suspected Google of doing the U.S. government’s bidding. But the company’s decision provoked a wave of sympathy and mourning, similar to what happened in January when Google first announced that it was considering withdrawing: “Citizen reporters posted constant updates on . . . Twitter, documenting the Chinese netizens who endlessly offered flowers, cards, poems, candles, and even formal bows in front of the big outdoor sign ‘Google’ located outside the company’s offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.”10 Security guards chased the mourners away, declaring the offerings “illegal flower tributes.” The term quickly spread in China’s online forums, symbolizing the suppression of freedom.

The public sphere in China involves much more than “tweets,” of course. Those often link to much longer blogs, discussion groups, and news reports. And many thought-provoking sites are harder to block because their critiques of CCP orthodoxy are subtler, elucidating democratic principles and general philosophical concepts, sometimes with reference to Confucianism, Taoism, and other strains of traditional Chinese thought that the CCP dares not ban. Full-scale blog posts (not subject to Twitter’s severe length limits) are far likelier to criticize the government (albeit artfully and euphemistically). Rebecca MacKinnon finds that China’s blogosphere is a “much more freewheeling space than the mainstream media,” with censorship varying widely across the fifteen blog-service providers that she examined. Thus, “a great deal of politically sensitive material survives in the Chinese blogosphere, and chances for survival can likely be improved with knowledge and strategy.”

Despite the diffuse controls, China’s activists see digital tools such as Twitter, Gmail, and filtration-evading software as enabling levels of communication, networking, and publishing that would otherwise be unimaginable in China today. With the aid of liberation technology, dissident intellectuals have gone from being a loose assortment of individuals with no specific goal or program to forming a vibrant and increasingly visible collaborative force. Their groundbreaking manifesto—Charter 08, a call for nineteen reforms to achieve “liberties, democracy, and the rule of law” in China—garnered most of its signatures through the aid of blog sites such as bullog.cn. When Charter 08 was released online on 10 December 2008, with the signatures of more than three-hundred Chinese intellectuals and human-rights activists, the government quickly moved to suppress all mention of it. But then, “something unusual happened. Ordinary people such as Tang [Xiaozhao] with no history of challenging the government began to circulate the document and declare themselves supporters,” shedding their previous fear. Within a month, more than five-thousand other Chinese citizens had signed the document. They included not just the usual dissidents but “scholars, journalists, computer technicians, businessmen, teachers and students whose names had not been associated with such movements before, as well as some on the lower rungs of China’s social hierarchy—factory and construction workers and farmers.”

Officials shut down Tang’s blog soon after she signed the Charter, and did the same to countless other blogs that supported it (including the entire bullog.cn site). But the campaign persists in underground salons, elliptical references, and subversive jokes spread virally through social media and instant messaging. One such joke imagines a testy Chinese president Hu Jintao complaining about the Charter’s democratic concepts such as federalism, opposition parties, and freedom of association. “Where do they all come from?” he demands. His minions run down the sources and bring him the bad news: The troublesome notions can be traced to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, the CCP, the official newspaper (the Xinhua Daily), and the constitution of the People’s Republic itself. A flustered Hu wonders what to do. His staff suggests banning all mention of these names. “You idiots!” shouts Hu. “If you ban them, you might as well ban me too!” “Well,” his staff retorts, “People do say that if they ban you, at least the Charter will be left alone.” (http://irevolution.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/diamond-21-3.pdf)


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