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February 2001
China Online
Navigating a haphazard and contradictory government policy, China's growing number
of Netizens are logging on with or without the Communist Party's blessing.
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By
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Last August, Chinese president Jiang Zemin acknowledged and welcomed the Internet with only a few caveats.
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It's 3 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon on Haidian Lu, one of the main drags through Beijing's equivalent of Silicon Valley. I've taken the train up from Shanghai, where I've lived for five years. In my 20-year relationship with China, I've worked mainly as a journalist and most recently as a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur. Hanging out in one of the dozens of crowded Internet cafés that line the street, I finally manage to snag a seat in front of a computer. I log on. The PC users around me are largely silent; New Age music plays over the speaker system. The customers seem mesmerized by the screens in front of them, whether chatting online, sending e-mail, or playing games. I seem to be the only one surfing the Web -- and am curious to see which Western news outlets the Chinese government has deemed appropriate.
I type in "NYTimes.com." The site doesn't come up. "IE cannot open a connection to NYTimes.com," the computer says. The Washington Post doesn't come up, either, but the staunchly anti-Communist Washington Times site does. The International Herald Tribune's site, IHT.com, is available (though it's usually blocked in Shanghai). LATimes.com comes up, but the Chicago Tribune site is blocked, as is the San Jose Mercury News's. The Miami Herald site is open, which is a relief since I'm a huge Dave Barry fan. WSJ.com is accessible, but most of the content is blocked -- not by the Chinese Communist Party but by Dow Jones's desire to profit from subscriptions -- and, well, I don't have a subscription. CNN.com is a no, The Sun of Baltimore is a yes, and The Boston Globe is another no. London's Financial Times website is open, and one of its top stories, by Richard McGregor, is about Chinese students who flout Internet controls: "An Internet Headache for China," the headline reads.
A headache? Not really. It's more of a minor nuisance. A nuisance for a divided government that craves the information and the economic advantage that the Internet provides but also wants to control access to what it considers potentially subversive ideology. It's a nuisance, too, for China's Internet users, who never know when and how that control will be exercised -- or whether they will be arrested or fined for challenging it. Despite the Internet regulations the government released last fall and its determination to establish Chinese websites that give users a variety of Communist Party-approved content, the people are finding ways around the system as the government struggles to settle on a policy.
Michael Robinson, the chief technical officer at the Beijing startup Leyou.com, which markets children's clothes and accessories, has been working in and around the Chinese telecommunications industry for five years. Robinson considers the Chinese authorities' filtering of Web addresses and other forms of control to be more symbolism than censorship. "People [in the West] often think of [China] as being like 1984 and Big Brother, but that's not it at all," says the California native. "It's much more aligned with Chinese concepts of face and respect for authority."
The latest figures state that about 17 million people in China use the Internet, up from 9 million at the end of 1999; they are the educated elite -- intellectuals, white-collar workers, students, and academics -- instrumental to the government's obsession with flourishing in a global economy. "The Chinese would love to disconnect the commercially useful aspects of the Internet from those elements that might be politically corrosive," says Kurt Campbell of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, in Washington, D.C. Given the sheer vastness of the Web, though, that's simply impossible. "The Internet is the most difficult challenge that [the Chinese authorities] face," Campbell says. "If you look at percentage increases in home pages and Internet activity, Asia is growing faster than any other region....Home installation of PCs in China still lags, but the advent of online coffee shops is a new feature which has great significance."
Since 1996, a year before China went online, the Chinese Communist Party has strictly regulated virtually all information that flows in from the outside world: newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Stopping newspapers from getting into China is easy, and satellite broadcasts have proved to be a minor inconvenience -- CNN airs only in China's top hotels. Nearly a decade ago, Rupert Murdoch challenged the authorities in Beijing when he said that satellite television would prove "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere." Angered, the Chinese authorities dismantled most of the country's satellite dishes, promoted their own cable networks, and used stick-and-carrot tactics to persuade Western media to conform to government requirements. (Murdoch removed the British Broadcasting Corporation from his Star TV network to please the Chinese government, and he sold the South China Morning Post to a pro-Beijing businessman.)
Then, in 1997 -- and accelerating in March 1998 when Premier Zhu Rongji took over from Li Peng -- China officially embraced the Internet. Last August, the 16th World Computer Congress, a biannual event run by the International Federation for Information Processing, was held in Beijing, and on its opening day, Chinese president Jiang Zemin acknowledged and welcomed the Internet with only a few caveats. "We should deeply realize the great power of the information technology and actively promote the development of the information technology," he said. "The convergence of the traditional economy and information network technology is a powerful force that will shape the social and economic development of the 21st century."
Now the government is investing heavily in Internet infrastructure: Chinese companies were supposed to have established some sort of Web presence by the end of 2000. What's more, the official media are full of information about new websites. Just as they foiled Murdoch's plans by promoting their own cable networks, the Chinese authorities are busy setting up their own Chinese-language content providers, such as chinadaily.com.cn and xinhuanet.com. Kathleen Hartford, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says that China is trying to create "a safe sandbox" of content on the Web that will attract its citizens and keep them from logging on to non-Chinese sites. "If you provide most of the content from within China and make sure you only provide safe content, that's probably going to be enough to keep most users from venturing into places that the government doesn't want them to go," she notes.
Chinese authorities try to filter out websites and information they consider hostile -- those that, for instance, contain pornography, advocate an independent Taiwan or Tibet, or question the Communist Party. They use a URL screening system, which is basically a list of forbidden addresses determined by the Ministry of State Security. The system checks the Web addresses surfers request against the master list and stops the connection if necessary. But a senior Chinese executive with one of the largest U.S. computer companies in Shanghai says the filtering has little impact on users' access to information. "They have cyber cops who monitor Internet activity and do surveys and checks on the Internet cafés," he says. "But I don't think it means a lot....They want free information; they know that free information is good for the Chinese economy."
So how does the government decide which Web addresses to ban? The process is arbitrary, and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, whose controlling shareholder is the Malaysian-Chinese magnate Robert Kuok, is a prime example. The paper publishes more news about mainland China than any other English publication outside China and reports on human rights, dissidents, beatings of devotees of the outlawed Falun Gong religious cult, Tibetan protests, and much else the Communist authorities supposedly want to stop leaking into China. Yet the South China Morning Post's website is not blocked. "It is not blocked because it is perceived as being not hostile to China," says Leyou.com's Robinson. "It's a matter of who is a part of the system and who is not." It's an offshoot of the traditional Chinese Communist worldview -- you're either for us or against us. And Kuok is viewed favorably.
The regulations Chinese authorities recently released attempt to establish a framework of control for Web content. They also set guidelines on foreign investment in Chinese Internet content providers (ICPs), limit listings on overseas stock exchanges, and hold website operators responsible for content. But how strictly they will be enforced is unclear -- and many merely restate existing (and largely ineffectual) policies. "The thing about Chinese laws is that you never know when they will be enforced," says Nina Hachigian, a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow based in Los Angeles who has drafted a paper on China's Internet policies that will appear in the March issue of Foreign Affairs.
"I'm not too worried about [the rules]," says Tony Zhang, the chief executive officer of the China portal website ChinaNow.com. "These regulations are not designed to destroy the business; they are just sending a message that you should be careful. Even without the rules, people are not going to carry sensitive content. No one wants to irritate the government if business is the primary objective," he says.
Hartford of the University of Massachusetts notes that the regulations defining confidential state information are vague (for example, financial data that could hurt a company's stock can be considered a state secret). "Almost anything can be considered a state secret when it comes to these rules," she says, adding that because enforcement is unclear, ICPs and Internet service providers will have to censor themselves.
According to the regulations, everyone in China who has a commercial Internet account must register with the government and agree not to violate the interests of the state. But outside the computer cafés in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities across China, you can buy anonymous prepaid access cards and get up to 60 hours of online time for $12. It's illegal, but no one seems to care, especially not state-owned China Telecom, which is trying to sign up as many surfers as possible to defray its infrastructure investments.
The minority of users intent on accessing information from sites the government considers unfriendly do it easily through proxies -- virtual server locations in different parts of the Internet from which a request to view a site bounces, fooling the Chinese cybercensor. However, notes Hachigian of the Council on Foreign Relations, though most casual
Chinese Web surfers may be interested in deeply subversive material, they, like most Americans, are not actively looking for it.
Chinese authorities worry more about the information's form than its substance. For instance, they do not block William Safire's latest New York Times op-ed column -- it can be e-mailed into China -- but they do block the Times website. The party also worries more about appearing to be in control than actually being in control. Still, warns Hartford, "appearing to be in control is a very powerful means of being in control....It makes everyone who crosses the invisible line vulnerable."
Chat rooms and e-mail are some of the most popular online functions in China -- possibly half of the users I spotted in the Haidian Lu Internet cafés were chatting online. "People chat about all sorts of things -- love, music, movies, movie stars," says Vivian Huang, a chat-room visitor in her early twenties. "A lot of people go to get advice on games and computer problems."
China-related chat rooms are now so popular that foreign news organizations in Beijing are monitoring them for news and feature ideas. Some of the most interesting stories of the past year have come from China's Internet chat rooms, where they are picked up and investigated by reporters, says a foreign journalist in Beijing. Prominent examples include the suicide last May of Li Fuxiang, director of China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange, who had managed the country's foreign reserves; the murder of a Beijing University student in May; and the recent storm of protest against Toshiba for failing to compensate Chinese laptop owners for defective computers. An essay by a former vice-president of China's Academy of Social Sciences, Li Shenji, in which he complained that the Communist era had turned out to be as feudally despotic as Imperial China, was anonymously posted on the Internet and inspired a bitter debate. The chat rooms were particularly active when Cheng Kejie, the former governor of the Guangxi autonomous region, was sentenced to death in July for corruption. Even the government-run chat rooms of the People's Daily hosted a lively discussion last spring after Chen Shui-bian was elected president of Taiwan, with some people declaring support for Chen even though China doesn't recognize an independent Taiwanese government.
"One explanation is that the Communist Party is happy with this chatroom activity," the foreign journalist says. "It's a low-grade way to allow people to let off steam. If it gets out of control, they can close down the site, but it's better than having these people out on the streets with placards."
And for now China seems content to be online. Back on Haidian Lu, about 50 people in the café are waiting for an available Web stall. The usage fee is 2 cents a minute, and the coffee is 80 cents a cup -- but no one is here for the coffee. They're here to connect to the world, and they're doing it with or without the blessing of the Communist Party. 
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