The Internet in China

A new, politically cynical generation is
coming to age for whom the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre is but a
childhood memory. To be sure, no one doubts that there is
widespread discontent with the regime, but dissent of any form is
systematically and ruthlessly suppressed. In China, the rights
people in Western societies take for granted--holding up
anti-government placards, assembling to discuss government
policies, or criticizing government policies--are punished with
unbelievably harsh penalties, including death. To be sure, millions
of Chinese may dislike their government, but why rock the boat,
especially when the regime seems capable of delivering a bigger
apartment, a better job, more electronic goodies, and maybe, just
maybe, a car of your very own. It's the ultimate irony in Marxism's
inglorious history: The most successful of the surviving regimes
clings to power by besotting the People with consumerism, which, in
Marxist theory at least, is one of the greatest evils of
capitalism.
The latest, greatest hope for Chinese democracy is the
Internet which, like everything else in China, is booming. In 1999,
the number of Internet users in China quadrupled to 9 million
(Solomon 2000, Lu 2000); the number is expected to grow to more
than 20 million by the end of this year (Liu and Platt 2000), and
to more than 120 million by 2004, a figure that would establish the
Chinese Internet as one of the largest in the world. The regime
knows perfectly well that the Internet is needed for continued
economic development, and it's investing heavily in the Internet
infrastructure.However, some say that by backing the Internet, the regime is
digging its own grave. With the Internet's capacity for promoting
free speech and political dissent, the Internet may undermine and
eventually destroy the regime, just as open communications (fax and
e-mail) are widely thought to have helped to bring down the Soviet
military coup in 1991.  Proponents of this view argue that
it's impossible to repress dissent on the Internet; as Electronic
Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore says, the Net
"interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". In a world
where advanced encryption technology enables anyone to become a
secret publisher and a secret reader, the truth will inevitably
come out. In an international context, the Internet provides what
legal scholars call regulatory arbitrage, the
ability to evade disliked domestic regulations by routing
communications and transactions through less restrictive regulatory
regimes (Froomkin 1996).Will the Internet aid democratization processes in China?
It's easy for foreigners to believe that it will: "The clampdown
[on the uses of the Internet to promote dissent] is futile," says
Newsweek (Liu and Platt 2000)" As fast as
Beijing can erect barriers, the country's Net users keep finding
ways around them." No less a figure than the U.S. President has
weighed in with this thesis. At a recent conference at Johns
Hopkins University, Clinton asked the audience to ponder how the
Internet could help China's transition to the principles of an
open, democratic society. When a member of the audience pointed out
that the regime was trying to suppress dissent on the Internet,
Clinton smiled and said, "Good luck. That's like trying to nail
Jell-O to the wall." (quoted in Liu and Platt 2000)I'm not so sure. In this essay, I'll examine the ways Chinese
dissidents have succeeded in circumventing government access and
content controls. As you'll see, it's quite possible for Chinese
activists to obtain information from the outside world, yet very
few attempt to do so. Fear of harsh penalties is one reason, and
perhaps the most important one. But the regime has also managed the
growth of the Internet so that almost all Internet users have
powerful incentives to support the government and to refrain from
voicing any criticism, however mild.  As this essay explains,
it's far from clear whether the Internet is aiding the cause of
democracy in China. In fact, a good argument could be made that
it's doing a great deal to solidify and enhance the Communist
Party's grip on the world's most populous nation.Routing Around CensorshipTo date, the Chinese government's efforts to monitor and
control Internet content have met with only moderate success, and
the reason, Chinese hackers affirm, is an almost laughable lack of
security. A Beijing hacker affirms that Chinese networks and
servers are almost ridiculously easy to break into: "I'd say 90
percent of them are insecure." (quoted in Fang 1998) Government
efforts to block access to undesirable foreign sites--an effort
that Chinese activists derisively call the "Great Firewall of
China"--do not prevent a moderately knowledgeable hacker from
accessing blocked sites such as Penthouse.com, Amnesty
International, CNN and freechina.org, a U.S. site created by
Shanghai hacktivist Lin Hai.  By means of
proxy
servers, which require very little technical knowledge to
use, still more Chinese Internet users can gain access to blocked
sites, but knowledge of English, still a rarity in China, is a plus
(Usdin 1997). Despite the technical possibility of accessing banned
sites, the flow of external accesses is best described as a mere
trickle. Blocked sites such as Human Rights in China and China News
Digest report receiving only a few dozen hits per week from within
China (Dobson 1998).The security shortfalls are doubtless attributable, in the
main, to a lack of technical expertise in China's rapidly growing
Internet sector. But state agencies and other organizations running
e-mail and web servers may have an incentive to keep security lax.
In the West, Internet service providers (ISPs) report that China is
increasingly a major source of unwanted e-mail (spam); the
percentage of Chinese sites on the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), a
list of IP addresses that are known to relay spam,  has
increased from one to five percent in just one year. Much of the
traffic doesn't originate in China--the mail comes from U.S.
spammers--but it takes advantage of poorly secured - or
deliberately under-secured--servers used to relay outgoing mail.
According to the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), a
California-based non-profit group that helps ISPs deal with spam,
U.S. and other spammers may be compensating Chinese server
administrators for providing relay services.It isn't lax security but the anonymity possible with
public-key encryption technologies that enables Chinese dissidents
to send material out of China for publication on U.S. web sites
such as Tunnel
(http://www.geocities.com/dchao.geo/index.html).
Managed and edited in China, Tunnel seeks to "break through the
present lock on information and controls on expression" (cited in
Dobson 1998; see also Anonymous 1998). Articles are encrypted and
uploaded to the U.S., and then mailed back to Chinese dissidents
from an anonymous remailer.In sum, Internet technology enables anyone with the requisite
knowledge to access banned information. That's not surprising. What
is surprising is how few people do so and how
little impact the banned information has in shaping China's
political system. To understand why, you need to examine the way
the Chinese government manages the growth of the Internet so that
Internet users are drawn into mutually supportive relationships
with bureaucrats and government organizations. You also need to
understand the risks people take when they engage in
dissent.Managing the Internet's Growth, One Step at a
TimeLet's take as a given that the Internet really does enable
people living within authoritarian regimes to engage in
undetectable, anonymous communications that enable them to publish
and read seditious material. According to Michael Froomkin (1996),
this capability alone is bad news for totalitarian regimes: "they
will be forced to choose between, on the one hand, limiting access
[as Singapore does] and paying a substantial price in economic
growth or, on the other hand, letting go of their control of
information, a traditional tool of social control." Froomkin, like
others who believe that the Internet inevitably favors
democratization, believes that governments will eventually learn
that they have to give up. They'll hold back their economies if
they limit access, and they'll fail in their attempt to control
Internet content.China may well prove Froomkin wrong. In China, as you'll see,
the regime has adopted a go-slow, managed growth policy that
enables them to deal with Internet problems one step at a time. By
carefully controlling the Internet's growth and weaving it deeply
into the fabric of the Party's complex network of business and
regulatory relationships, the regime is building an Internet user
base that has little incentive to use the network for seditious
purposes; on the contrary, most Internet users in China have
everything to gain by supporting the government line.That's the carrot. And as you'll see, there's a stick, too--a
big one.The CarrotTerrified of the open information access that the Internet
enables, authoritarian regimes worldwide seek to limit Internet
access to selected and easily controlled populations, those who
have a lot to lose by challenging authority (and much to gain by
keeping connected). For example, Saudi Arabia allows universities,
selected businesses and medical institutions to connect to the
Internet; there's no concept of providing access to the entire
population (Mendels 1996). In Singapore, the government achieves
much the same effect by limiting ISP competition to three
state-entitled firms. By eliminating competition from the ISP
sector, the Singapore government  slows the pace of growth and
simplifies content-monitoring tasks.The Chinese strategy is a blend of these: the state wants to
control and manage the Internet infrastructure in China so social
penetration can be managed step-by-step; the result is that
Internet access in China has been limited thus far to the
population that, as will be seen, is least likely to challenge the
status quo. In the meantime, the state plans to implement a massive
and repressive security infrastructure (Chen 2000) that will enable
precise content monitoring when the network grows too large for
manual supervision.The perils posed to the regime by rapid, uncontrolled growth
are amply illustrated by the newest Chinese craze, chat rooms.
Previously unsupervised, chat rooms enabled the now-outlawed Falun
Gong movement to coordinate its April, 1999 protest, when 10,000
Falun Gong members appeared at the gates of the Zhongnanhai
leaders' compound in Beijing to protest the government's actions in
harassing the movement and its leaders (Lestz 1999). Having learned
its lesson, the regime now requires all Internet chat rooms to be
supervised by a government monitor who deletes comments that are
critical of the Communist Party. The result is that discussion is
skewed in ways that favor the official view. For example, in the
wake of NATO's action of bombing the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade,
government-censored chat rooms allowed all comments that accused
the U.S. of undertaking the bombing deliberately; messages
questioning this view were promptly deleted. Despite the
prohibition on using the Internet to plan demonstrations, most
observers believe that the government not only encouraged but
actively aided students who used the Internet to plan days of
violent protests outside the U.S. Embassy. Still, too-rapid growth
could allow chat rooms to spiral out of control. As one Party
censor commented, "That is a problem for us. Right now we don't
know just what we will do." (quoted in Rosenthal 1999)To hold back the pace of growth so that it does not
 overwhelm the censors, Beijing regulators initially adopted
policies that held back (and even prevented) foreign investment in
China's telecommunications infrastructure, thus ensuring slow
growth and high access fees (Sautede 1996). Catherine Mann, an
economist who urged Chinese officials to open the telecom system to
foreign investment, noted with dismay that the czars of Internet
and telecommunications development in Beijing seem to want to "slow
down the development of electronic commerce, or manage [its]
development, or perhaps look more inward" (quoted in McMahon 1999).
The regime's motive for the foot-dragging strategy? Foreign
analysts emphasize the greed dimension; after all, the regime is a
major owner of the Chinese Internet's infrastructure. "There is a
lot of money to be made here," says a Hong Kong-based investment
analyst (quoted in Anonymous 2000b); the regime "doesn't want to
lose it". The value of Internet-based transactions in China is
expected to reach US $11.7 billion by 2004 (McMahon 1999). But the
foot-dragging reveals another motive.  Beijing may want to
profit from the country's Internet, but they also want to control
the pace of growth to make sure the network evolves slowly until
the regime is convinced that the technology exists to enable
effective
broadband content monitoring.Recently, under pressure from World Trade Organization (WTO)
negotiators and internal pressure from capital-starved Chinese web
sites such as sina.com, the regime grudgingly granted permission
for mainland sites to sell up to 49% of their stock to foreign
investors; the figure will rise to 50% after a two-year "waiting
period" (Anonymous 2000b). Still, the regime fully intends to
manage the flow of foreign investment in such a way that it can
continue to shape the Chinese Internet's political impact. For
example, foreigners cannot invest in the woefully overtaxed
telecommunications infrastructure that links China to the rest of
the world (Anonymous 2000a), for one simple reason: the regime does
not want the Chinese Internet to have more external
bandwidth.The combination of high access fees and slow infrastructural
growth initially combined to restrict Internet access to a
well-defined and political apathetic user community, one that, like
Internet users in Saudi Arabia, had much to lose by challenging
government regulations. According to recent studies, the typical
Internet user in China is male, young, single, university educated,
relatively affluent and works in the rapidly-expanding IT sector
(China Internet Consumer Report, quoted in
Anonymous 2000c). Such users have little to gain from undertaking
actions that would lead the government to crack down on the
Internet; in contrast, their futures depend on rapid Internet
growth and keeping out of trouble with the government.To be sure, the Chinese government insists that it wants the
Internet to grow, but it also wants the growth to occur on its own
terms. For example, the recently announced 169 network offers
inexpensive access (approximately 22 U.S. cents per hour) prevents
access to external Web sites; the network uses a non-standard
addressing system which, the regime claims, creates more network
addresses for Chinese users (U.S. Embassy, Beijing 1998). With
low-cost access finally available, less educated Chinese are
finally beginning to show up on the Chinese Internet (Greenberg
2000), but they're accessing an Internet that is technically
designed to prevent access to external Web sites.For Chinese Internet users, the incentives to avoid any
criticism of the regime aren't abstract; they're personal and
immediate in a way that foreigners may find hard to understand. The
lubricant that smoothes the gears of China's booming economy is
called guanxi, a Chinese world that is usually
(and incorrectly) translated as "connections" (e.g., see Sheff
1999). As anthropologist Duran Bell points out (Bell 2000), the
concept is much deeper than the word  "connections" implies;
guanxi implies a web or nesting of mutual and personal
relationships that amounts to extending the emotional depth of
family relations to persons and organizations
outside the family. If you've got guanxi with
powerful Party members and bureaucrats, you go places. For example,
Beijing-based CCIDNet.com, which specializes in electronics
industry news, is run by a 39-year-old ex-government bureaucrat
named Li Yang; the company's main shareholder is a subsidiary of
the Ministry of Information Industry (MII). CCIDNet.com has a "big
edge," says Li, because the "MII really trusts and believes in us"
(Anonymous 2000).  As many foreign investors have learned to
their profit, it's very wise to invest in Chinese enterprises that
are loaded with guanxi.  For example,
Hong Kong-based Chinadotcom Corp. is known to have the blessings of
Beijing's official Xinhua news agency. Surprise! Chinadotcom was
the big winner in the Chinese IPO sweepstakes; the company raised
over $450 million and is now getting 16 million hits per day
(Anonymous 2000b). From the tycoon level down to the CGI Joes in
web production shops, there's every reason to stay on the
government's good side: Your future depends on it.The StickIf the incentives to tow the official line aren't sufficient
to suppress dissent within China, there's a collection of Draconian
laws that would make any reasonable person think twice before using
the Internet to challenge the state.For years, China's Internet users have been required to
register with local police, and the regime hasn't hesitated to
arrest and detain anyone who is found to have accessed or
distributed banned material. New laws come along quite quickly when
the regime concludes they're needed. For example, many chat room
participants log on using the Internet bars and cafes that are
proliferating throughout China. A spate of regulations announced in
January 1999 require the owners of Internet bars and cafes to
register with local police, prevent customers from engaging in
activities harmful to state security and monitor their users'
on-line usage; they will be held personally responsible for
infractions originating from their premises (Ribao 1999).But nothing compares in scope to the sweeping new laws
announced by the regime this fall (Anonymous 2000a). These laws
criminalize all of the following:

• Gaining unauthorized access to computer information
  systems containing information about state affairs, state defense
  and the "most advanced" science and technology of the state;
• Stealing or leaking classified information or
  military secrets via the Internet;
• Producing and spreading computer viruses or using
  programs that stop the operation of computer networks and
  communication services;
• Spreading rumors, slander or "other information" on
  the Internet for the purpose of overthrowing the state government
  or the socialist system, breaking up the country or destroying its
  unity;
• Igniting racial or ethnic hatred and discrimination
  or attempting to use the Internet to destroy racial and ethnic
  unity;
• Organizing cults or contacting cult members via the
  Internet;
• Using the Internet to engage in swindles or
  burglary, including selling defective products or making false
  claims for goods or services;
• Concocting and spreading false information via the
  Internet to influence securities trading and futures
  trading;
• Establishing or providing links to pornographic web
  sites or pages;
• Insulting other people or businesses or fabricating
  stories to slander others or damage product reputations via the
  Internet;
• Illegally intercepting, changing or deleting other
  people's e-mail or other data, thus infringing on people's freedom
  of information; or
• Infringing on other people's rights to intellectual
  property on the Internet.

In addition to these sweeping regulations, the regime is
developing a strategy to deal with encryption, the technical means
by which Chinese Internet users can engage in anonymous
communications. Foreign software firms are required to disclose the
algorithms they use in any imported products with encryption.
Domestic companies are prevented from using foreign products that
lack the regime's approved "back-door" decryption
capabilities.Beijing does not hesitate to throw people in jail--even put
them to death--for violating its Draconian laws. Faced with the
incentives to support the government line, as well as the
disincentives of harsh, unjust punishment, most Internet users in
China are rightfully terrified of doing anything that could get
them in trouble. Can you blame them?ConclusionRather than paving the way for the blossoming of democracy in
China, the Internet is arguably doing precisely the opposite: 
It's providing the regime with yet another opportunity for weaving
official corruption, guanxiand state
supervision into the very fabric of the emerging information
infrastructure in China. What's more, the regime is getting plenty
of help from foreign investors and
IT
corporations  who leave their high-minded, free speech
ideals at home. The prevailing attitude seems to be, "Who cares
about democracy? Lots of people are getting rich, and millions of
Chinese are being pulled up from the grip of poverty."There's always the chance, to be sure, that the Internet's
growth will overwhelm content control efforts, or some new
technology will provide even greater anonymity to would-be
dissenters. In a China with 200 million Internet users, such
developments could pose genuine problems for the regime. But that's
precisely the reason for the go-slow, one-step-at-a-time strategy.
The Party is learning how to manage the Internet's growth so that
the emerging infrastructure favors businesses that are deeply
linked to state bureaucrats and ministries, while at the same time
they're making equally sure that access is limited primarily to
populations with compelling interests in the status quo.
Outrageously harsh penalties serve to convince would-be dissenters
that it's wiser to think about that nifty new stereo system.In writing this essay, I don' t mean to belittle the efforts
of people who have fought (and in some cases given their lives) for
democratic change in China. But I do mean to insist that our myths
about the liberalizing effects of the Internet are just
that--myths. In China, the Internet is emerging as a capable tool
by which the regime advances repression with the help of
multinational corporations and the international financial
community.That's precisely why people living in liberal, Western
democracies need to stand guard to make sure that the same, ugly
process does not overwhelm them, too. China's new Internet laws
sound repugnant, but almost all of them, mutatis
mutandis, have been proposed by various repressive or
conservative constituencies in U.S. state and federal legislatures,
and many of them have been signed into law. Already, U.S. citizens
journeying in cyberspace have lost (or are about to lose) many of
the rights they have enjoyed since the Republic's founding, such as
the right to the privacy of the letters in their home, the right to
lease or sell creative works that they have lawfully purchased, the
right to criticize corporations that make defective or dangerous
products and much more. The penalties are in China's league, if not
worse; for example, violations of the obscenity provisions of the
1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA)--provisions that are, despite
the Supreme Court's reversal of the CDA's indecency regulations,
very much still in the law--specify fines and prison terms that
exceed those of second-degree murder. I suspect that many people
who are quite willing to criticize Beijing aren't aware that some
of the same repressive processes are occurring right under their
noses.Bryan Pfaffenberger is a professor in the University of
Virginia's pioneering Division of Technology, Culture and
Communications, where his research and teaching focuses on the
legal, political and economic ramifications of the Internet and
open-source software.Resources for Further StudyAmnesty International,
China
1999. Required reading for anyone wishing to understand the
nature and extent of political repression in China.University of Melbourne, Australia.
Chinese
Studies WWW Virtual Library.China
Internet Directory. Directory to web sites within
China.China Online.
A U.S.-based news and analysis site focusing on business
information about China.Bick-har Yeung, Univ. of Melbourne,
Internet
and Chinese Studies Resources. An introduction to the
Internet in China, including the history of Internet development in
China, coding systems for Chinese documents, Chinese search
engines, and links to additional resources.Human Rights in
China. New York-based site focusing on political repression
in China.Heidelberg University, Germany.
 Internet
Guide for China Studies.ReferencesAnonymous 1998. "Chinese tunnel through the Net,"
The Economist, Vol. 346, No. 8054 (February 7,
1998), p. 43.Anonymous. 2000a.  "China drafts law on Internet-based
crimes," China Online October 24, 2000).
Available online at
htp://www.chinaonline.com/topstories/001024/1/c00102312.asp.Anonymous. 2000b.  "Did China miss the boat?
Business Week (April 17, 2000), p.
28ff. Anonymous. 2000c. "The China Internet Consumer
Report: New Report Detailing China's Online Users,"
China Online (November 19, 1998). Available
online at
http://www.chinaonline.com/specialevents/internetconsumer.html.Bell, Duran. 2000. "Guanxi: a nesting of groups,"
Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 1 (February
2000), available online at
http://www.hamclub.uci.edu/~dbell/Chen, Judy M. 2000. "IT Multinationals: Willing Partners to
Repression in China?" Available online at
http://www.hrichina.org/Beijing
IT Trade Show -- Judy Chen.htmlDobson, William J. 1998.  "Protest.org: Chinese
dissenters get on to the Net," New Republic,
Vol. 219, No. 1 (July 6, 1998), pp. 18-21.Fang, Bay. 1998. "Chinese 'hacktivists' spin a Web of
trouble: the regime is unable to control the Internet,"
U.S. News & World Report, Vol. 125, No. 12
(September 28, 1998), p. 47.Froomkin, A. Michael. 1996. "The Internet as a Source of
Regulatory Arbritrage," in Brian Kahin and Charles Nesson (eds.),
Borders in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1997). Available online at
http://personal.law.miami.edu/%7Efroomkin/articles/arbitr.htm.Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The
end of history and the last man. New York: Avon
Books.Lestz, Michael. 1999. "Why smash the Falun Gong?"
Religion in the News, Vol. 2, No. 3. Available
online at
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol2No3/Falun
Gong.htm.Liu, Melinda, and Kevin Platt. 2000. "China's E-Rebels,"
Newsweek International (October 2, 2000), p.
52.Lu, Peter Weigang. 2000. "Internet Developments in China: An
Analysis of the CNNIC Survey Report," available online at
http://www.virtualchina.com/infotech/analysis/chinanet-cnnic-1.htmlMcMahon, William J. 1999. "China needs open Internet -
Experts," China Online (November 8, 1999).
Available online at
http://www.chinaonline.com/industry/infotech/newsarchive/secure/1999/november/c9110523.aspMendels, Pamela. 1996. "Worldwide, Internet restrictions are
growing," New York Times (September 10, 1996).
Available online at
http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/091restrict.html.Niccolai, James. 2000. "China spammers a growing source of
e-mail headaches. InfoWorld, Vol. 24, No. 17
(April 24, 2000).Ribao, Tianjin. 2000. "China Issues New Regulations For
Internet Cafes," China Online (January 21,
1999). Available online at
http://www.chinaonline.com/issues/internet_policy/NewsArchive/Secure/1999/September/sp_b2_99012119.aspRoberts, Steven V., et al., 1989.  "New diplomacy by Fax
Americana," U.S. News and World Report (June
19, 1989), p. 32.Sautede, Eric. 1996. "The Internet in China: Between and
Constable and the Gamekeeper," China
Perspectives, No. 4 (March/April 1996), pp. 6-8.
Available online at
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/9682/CP4.html.Sheff, David. 1999. "He's got guanxi!"
Wired, Vol. 7, No. 2 (February, 1999).
Available online at
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/bofeng.html.Solomon, Jonathan. 2000.  "Business as usual: Effects of
the Internet in China," New Scientist, Vol.
165, No. 2234 (April 15, 2000), pp. 34ff.United States Embassy (Beijing), "PRC Internet: cheaper, more
popular, and more Chinese," available online at
http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/Inetcawb.htm.Usdin, Steve. 1997.  "China Online: Behind the Great
(Fire)Wall," Yahoo Internet Life. Available
online at
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/mag/9701/china9701.html.

email: ljeditors@ssc.com