The Great Firewall is neither great, nor a firewall. Discuss.
BY EVELINE CHAO |
NOVEMBER 20, 2012
Last week, Xi Jinping's chairmanship of the Communist Party
was announced, and collectively, the Chinese Internet breathed a sigh of relief.
Netizens rejoiced as the web returned to its normal speed, while
censors, government officials, and Internet companies finally allowed themselves to stop fretting about
making any missteps during the highly sensitive week-long, once-in-a-decade
political meeting -- the 18th Party Congress -- which decided China's new leadership structure.
Within a few hours, the top trending topics on Sina Weibo, China's
homegrown equivalent to Twitter, included political topics like incoming Premier
Li Keqiang's resumé and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's November 15 comments
that he isn't bothered by online criticism because such
things are normal in a democracy. But for most of the week-long Party Congress, however,
the top Weibo chatter (part censorship, part apathy) had focused mostly on
Chinese pop celebs.
Though the blocks varied, terms censored on Weibo throughout the
Congress period included the names of numerous Communist Party politicians; shiba da, the
Chinese abbreviation for the Party Congress; several unrelated homophones of shiba
da; the word "Sparta" (which sounds like shibada in Chinese); the euphemistic phrase
"area of political importance" (the meeting was held at Beijing's Great Hall of
the People, which lies close to Tiananmen Square); and words pertaining to
taxis and windows (due to much-ridiculed
rules directing Beijing taxi drivers to remove their rear window
cranks during this period, apparently to prevent protestors from throwing
ping-pong balls containing political messages).
Few people remain unaware that the Internet is censored for China's 538
million users,
but misperceptions persist
about how it
works. Here are five of the most common myths about Chinese online censorship, debunked.
1.
Censorship means the Chinese are left in the dark.
Nope.
While China chatter is rife with stories of people who today still have no idea,
say, that Beijing massacred civilians on Tiananmen Square, for the most part,
Chinese Internet users are cosmopolitan, educated, and informed. Many use, or
at least know they can use, circumvention technology like VPNs (Virtual Private
Networks) to access blocked content. (These will always thrive, if nothing
else, in order to access porn.)
Chinese
netizens are aware of what they're missing, in part because the censorship
apparatus makes little attempt to hide itself. Attempts to visit blocked sites
sometimes return responses that make them indistinguishable from genuine
technical issues, but most return messages such as "Sorry, the host you were
looking for does not exist, has been deleted, or is being investigated." Until the
beginning of November, searching for blocked terms on Sina Weibo returned the
message "Due to relevant laws and regulations, results are not displayed." Now
though, the message reads "Sorry, unable to
find [keyword] related results." Sometimes the blocked messages are more
playful: In 2006, the Internet Surveillance Division of the city of Shenzhen's
Public Security Bureau even launched two cutesy Internet
police cartoon characters, named Jingjing and Chacha, who appear on websites to
remind users they're being watched. Their names come from the syllables of
"jingcha," Chinese for "police." Beijing
launched its own version in
2007.
Perhaps
the best evidence of netizens' knowledge of their own censorship, though, is
their hatred of Fang Binxing, president of Beijing
University of Posts and Telecommunications and the architect of the censorship system's blocking mechanism,
nicknamed "The Great Firewall."
In December 2010, Fang (who has said he
has 6 VPNs on his computer) opened a microblog account on Sina Weibo. Within
three hours he had attracted so
many hate comments -- unlike Twitter, Sina Weibo includes a commenting feature --
that his posts, and the comments, were taken down. To
add insult to injury, in May 2011, students pelted Fang
with shoes and eggs when he gave a talk at Wuhan University in
central China.
After both incidents, Fang's name was blocked on Sina Weibo.
2.
It's the government that censors.
This
is true -- to a point. The government maintains the Great Firewall and hires Internet police as well as wumaodang, or "50-cent party members" -- people paid
to influence Internet discussion by writing social media posts extolling the
government's position on issues. They're known as "50-cent" because they're
selling out for cheap; the Chinese equivalent of a two-dollar whore. There are
an estimated 250,000-300,000 wumaodang, who sometimes work with China's 30,000-50,000
Internet police.
But
beyond this, the government has roped private companies into carrying out most
of their own censoring. Companies must sign a "Public Pledge
on Self-Discipline for China Internet Industry" in order to get a Chinese Internet
Content Provider license, and the government holds all Internet companies operating within China,
both foreign and domestic, liable for everything
that appears on their sites. This includes comments on social media, and even
on online chat and instant messaging. Companies deemed not in compliance can
have their business license revoked and be summarily shut down.
As
a result, every large Internet company employs its own censors. Charles
Chao, the CEO of Sina reluctantly told Forbes in March 2011 that the company
employs at least 100 "monitors," though Internet expert and activist Rebecca
MacKinnon estimates the number is
closer to 1,000.
The guidelines for these censors are vague, which Jason Q. Ng, a graduate student at the University of
Pittsburgh who studies the Chinese Internet and tracks banned terms at his blog
Blocked on Weibo, says
is intentional. "Most of the time people at the companies are trying to suss
out what's sensitive this week, and let's do this right now because otherwise
the government will come back next week and say, ‘Why didn't you do this?' and
punish them. This creates a culture, perhaps not of fear, but where
corporations realize they need to be on their toes to stay ahead of where the
government puts down the hammer next." In other words: to make sure they stay
within the unstated bounds, overly cautious companies wind up censoring more than
necessary.
3.
No one is allowed to criticize the government.
False.
The government rarely sets out explicit censorship guidelines, making it
difficult to determine what gets censored and what doesn't. But, a Harvard University
working paper on social media censorship, the most recent version of which was released in October, found that there is plenty of criticism of the
government online.
The
team downloaded nearly 3.7 million posts (mainly from BBS and blog platforms, not
microblogs) from 1,400 social media services over six months in 2011 (a period
that included the arrest of Ai Weiwei, protests in Inner Mongolia
and Zengcheng, and deadly bombings in Fuzhou).
About
13 percent of all social media posts were censored. "We had thought certain
topics would always be censored, but censorship didn't occur by topic," said
Pan in an interview. Instead, censorship was focused on what the study calls
posts with "high collective action potential" -- that is, posts that "represent, reinforce, or spur
social mobilization, regardless of content." MacKinnon concurs: "The
censorship that takes place, it's less about trying to catch every little
thing, because they can't catch every little thing. The priority is placed on people using
the social networks
to organize."
The
Harvard paper describes several thousands of posts they found containing
scathing critiques of China, the one-child policy, the country's failure to
democratize, condemnation of local officials by name, and references to the
1989 Tiananmen protests, which were not deleted. By contrast, during the arrest
of Ai Weiwei, the Inner Mongolia protests, and the Fuzhou bombings, 80 percent
of posts alluding to those events were deleted, likely due to fears of
collective action such as solidarity protests.
The
government fear of organized protest also jibes with the uneasy status that NGOs have in
China. They are viewed with suspicion by the government; indeed, the very
phrase "non-governmental organization" reads like a description of everything
the Party fears.
4.
Internet censorship is carried out in a
blanket fashion.
Unlikely. When the New
York Times website was blocked in China in October after publishing an
article on the $2.7 billion amassed by the family of then-Premier Wen Jiabao,
the online chatter was
uncertain as to what actually happened. This kind of confusion often occurs in
discussions of China's Internet blocks because the censorship employs a variety
of different methods. These include connection resetting (which returns an error message that usually occurs when a
site is down or has moved to a different address); redirection to China
(typing in Skype.com from within China will take you to Skype.tom.com, its
local partner which is subject to Chinese regulations); DNS poisoning (wherein the Internet service provider changes the DNS
record of the blocked site, taking one to a dummy web server hosting a block
page, which could contain malware); throttling (severely slowing
down a site in lieu of blocking it outright, often done to Gmail in China); and timing out (when the site
tries to load for so long that the browser gives up; indistinguishable from a
genuine technical problem).
Content
providers also employ a variety of techniques. Sina Weibo users can post anything they
like, and often sensitive posts will even appear in their personal feed, but
the post is blocked from search results. In other words, a user might have no
idea their post has been "disappeared" and their friends and other users can't
see the post in their feeds. After a term has been unblocked, it quietly reappears in users'
feeds and search results.
None of this means that a country-wide "kill switch" isn't
possible -- there are only
a few tubes into China and, though hard to imagine, it would be easy to black out the entire
country very quickly. Internet in
Xinjiang, China's largest region geographically, with a population of 21.8
million, was almost entirely
shut down for 10 months from July 2009 to May 2010 after riots in
Urumqi, the provincial capital, left what state media estimated at 197 dead. Text messaging
and international calling were also blacked
out for six of those months. And parts of Tibet are still currently blacked out.
5. The Internet will lead to democracy.
Dream
on. In his 2007 book The China Fantasy,
journalist James Mann devoted an entire chapter
to refuting an idea he called "The Starbucks Fallacy" -- the belief among
Westerners that exposure to icons of Western capitalism like Starbucks and
McDonald's would inevitably lead to democracy.
Today,
post-Arab Spring, we might be in the middle of a Facebook Fallacy. After the
resignation of Hosni Mubarak in
February
2011, activist and Google executive Wael Ghonim said, "If you want to liberate
a society just give them the Internet." But the Internet is not enough in the
absence of the right political, social, and economic factors. And tools of free
speech can be tools of surveillance. VPNs, so widely used to circumvent
censorship, are easily blocked and monitored. "There are a lot of people in
China who are signing up for random VPN services, but have no idea who's
running them and what relationship they might have with what government, or
what companies," said MacKinnon. "A VPN is only as secure as the people running
the VPN."
In
2000, President Bill Clinton said: "There's no
question China has been trying to crackdown on the Internet. Good luck! That's
sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."
But,
as Ng put it, "China has the world's biggest nail gun."
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