A
blogger's tale: The Stainless Steel
Mouse By James Borton
Detained
in solitary confinement for more than a year, Liu Di,
23, a post-graduate psychology student at Beijing Normal
University, learned a lesson the hard way about the
dangers of participatory journalism or blogging in
China. Finally released from Qincheng Prison, she has
resumed her university studies. News articles revealed
that her subversive cyber crimes, committed under the
screen name, "Stainless Steel Mouse", were mainly
criticisms of renewed restrictions on Internet cafes, a
plea for more freedom of expression on the Internet and
- oh, yes - a satire of the Chinese Communist Party.
Liu, is only one of many new Chinese bloggers -
one conservative estimate places the number at 300,000 -
who are becoming high-profile symbols for democracy and
free speech. (China's reformist President Hu Jintao is
believed to approve of, even support, websites that
criticize and discredit anti-reformers and his rivals.)
Part of the reason the phrase "blog" has entered
the universal lexicon is that the word avoids confusion
with the descriptive technical phrase server "log".
China has seen a significant rise in the number of web
logs with an estimated 10,000 active bloggers and more
than 600 web logs. Web logs are referred to in Chinese
as bo ke, which is phonetically similar to the
word "blog", but also has a literal meaning of rich or
abundant traveler, says Andrew Lih, assistant professor
and director of technology at the Journalism and Media
Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong.
While the Chinese government pushes carefully
and not too fast for media reform, the Public Security
Bureau maintains a crackdown on Internet content - from
politics to pornography - as the government struggles to
gain control over the new and increasingly popular
medium. Beijing's State Security Protection Bureau has
also established an elaborate Internet police force,
believed to number more than 30,000 people, blocking
some foreign news sites and shutting down some domestic
sites posting politically incorrect writings.
"Chinese bloggers have a lot of say in their
future. It really depends on the extent to which
government censors restrict what everyday users can do.
Most users don't care if the government blocks
information about really controversial topics like
Tiananmen Square or Taiwanese independence," says Bobson
Wong from Internet Communications in New York. "But
there are situations where, if enough users speak out
and protest, government officials will back down. This
is what happened with Liu Di - she wasn't a dissident,
just a student who didn't like government restrictions.
The protest against her detention was far more
widespread than the protest against the detentions of
most pro-democracy activists," Wong told Asia Times
Online.
Reporters Without Borders has published
its annual report on the state of online freedom in more
than 60 countries - The Internet Under Surveillance. The
rights of Internet users, webmasters and online
journalists have been substantially curbed since the
September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. The
fight against terrorism has led to stricter monitoring
of Internet traffic in both democracies and
authoritarian regimes.
Reporters Without
Borders cites cyber-dissidents Two countries that
systematically place people in jail for posting
"subversive" topics online are China, which has placed
at least 63 cyber-dissidents in prison, and Vietnam,
which has incarcerated at least seven, the annual report
said. The actual numbers of those harassed and detained
are probably much higher, observers said.
"All
online media [chat rooms excepted] are required to use
content provided by mainstream media. This content is
subject to strict party monitoring. There is almost no
content widely accessible in China that is not monitored
by the Propaganda Department [of the communist party],"
says Ashley Esarey, Columbia University researcher and
PhD candidate. "Chat rooms routinely erase controversial
postings to avoid trouble. Personnel at news media
organizations that incur the wrath of the party are
dismissed and media organizations themselves that do so
are shut down immediately," Esarey told Asia Times
Online.
A conservative estimate has more than
300,000 bloggers operating in China. There are at least
two types of bloggers, or participatory journalists or
diarists: common bloggers, who use blog service to
maintain their blogs, and devoted bloggers,
professionals who have technical backgrounds and prefer
to build up a blog themselves using popular blog
publishing systems such as Moveable Type. This
downloadable, free non-commercial publishing software
can transform any blogger into a Matt Drudge or other
Internet-type who breaks stories.
The
professional bloggers are the most active in China. Of
course, some observers speculate that the increase in
bloggers is directly proportional to the tidal wave of
foreign-educated Chinese returning since 2002. These MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Stanford
University and graduates from other schools, considered
the best and brightest, have now gone back to the
mainland, armed with technical proficiency and American
cultural and geo-political road maps.
Blogs are
gaining ground each week in China, more than 15 years
after authorities crushed the peaceful pro-democracy
demonstration in Tiananmen Square. Today, the rallying
cry for change and political dialogue takes place on
cell phones via SMS, in chat rooms, and on bulletin
boards, where there's anonymity and relative safety from
reprisals.
"In places with restricted press
access, web logs have become an important reality check
for the mainstream media, allowing ordinary citizens to
help craft the news and keep traditional media sources
accountable," writes professor Lih of the Journalism and
Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong.
Researchers have documented multiple methods
through which Internet activity is restricted in China -
a combination of tough regulations, sophisticated
filtering technology and harsh treatment of
pro-democracy activists who use the Internet. However, a
few Chinese researchers indicate that this censorship is
neither as extreme nor as unpopular in China as many
Westerners might think. In fact, most Chinese users show
little interest in banned political activity online, as
evident by examining some of the top Chinese blogs.
Blogs a growing grassroots
influence "Blogs are really a growing grassroots
influence in Chinese Society and Culture," says Kevin
Wen of Differential Technology in Texas. Blogs and the
Internet are assuming such increased importance in China
that a few months ago the University of California at
Berkeley's School of Journalism hosted a conference on
China's Digital Future.
Despite the threat of
detentions, Chinese Internet users are making their
voices heard. Through online petitions and bulletin
board messages, thousands of individuals use the
Internet to criticize government policy, and in some
cases officials have even bowed to public pressure
conveyed online.
For example, last year Lu
Yunfei, a college graduate from Chongqing, produced his
own nationalistic site to protest a possible contract to
a Japanese consortium to build a bullet train between
Beijing and Shanghai. In one week his Patriots' Alliance
Web gained almost 90,000 online signatures, possibly
making the government think twice before awarding the
contract to Japan because of its war-time atrocities in
China. The net result appears to be that Beijing does
not object to the emergence of dozens of nationalistic
sites pioneered by Chinese activists who periodically
fuel anti-America ideologues and even threaten Taiwan if
that island seeks official independence from the Middle
Kingdom. Lu and others may even turn their online
activism to the environmental devastation faced by the
rapidly growing and industrializing nation.
"Now
media in China are in some ways part of an emerging
civil society. They have influence, even on politics at
times. Concerns about the environment, corruption and
some policy issues are explored somewhat permissively.
However, it would be flat wrong to think there is now in
China a level of media freedom that resembles Western
standards," according to Walter Hutchens, assistant
professor, Smith School of Business at the University of
Maryland. "Indeed, watching Chinese media develop is
like watching human rights in China - you are gratified
to see undeniable progress in many areas, but your best
hopes are often crushed," Hutchens told Asia Times
Online.
Recently there have been new reports and
commentaries about a blog service provider crackdown in
China. Regardless of whether various blog communities
were being forced to shut down by authorities or whether
they shut down voluntarily for their own protection, a
large number of blogger communities have been disrupted.
This past spring the government temporarily shut down
leading blogging sites - Blogbus.com, Blogcn.com and
Blogdrive.com - for allowing politically sensitive
content to be posted; they were later re-opened after
their content was sanitized.
Controversial
material posted, then erased "Bloggers are like
all the other print and television media in the sense
that politically sensitive material gets them into
trouble. For a while bloggers were harder to monitor,
but the Chinese Communist Party is on to the risk of the
technology spreading unsupervised and it has taken
aggressive action. Bloggers I have spoken to who don't
want to risk their sites getting blocked erase
controversial material as a matter of course," Columbia
University researcher Esarey wrote in an e-mail response
to Asia Times Online.
What is more remarkable is
the online posting from the Chinese edition of CNBlog
about its monumental plans for a citizen reportage
project in which bloggers who blog in Chinese are
invited to blog about the lives and living conditions of
ordinary Chinese people who do not currently and are
unlikely to ever have a blog. CNBlog's posting includes
this poetic and political refrain, sadly reminiscent of
a lyrical Woody Guthrie ballad, Near Riot, from
the 1930s about America's own disenfranchised and poor
caught up in the Depression.
"They are working
men, or so-called Lao-bai-xing. Ordinary
people/folks. They never blog, and would not blog in
the future. Their pleasure, anger, sorrow and joy
just like breeze on the mother earth, neither here nor
there. They are a great river, changing the earth,
full of strength but always keeping silence. They are
everyone, They are us."
This network technology
project has been launched for the promotion of Chinese
blogs to intervene in social life, blogging and
documenting the existence of ordinary Chinese not even
counted in the hackneyed phrase "digital divide". So
far, the political implications embedded in this
educational framework have neither foundered, nor been
halted by the ubiquitous Chinese Security Net.
The Internet is also supporting an informal
group of Chinese volunteers at work building an
impressive online encyclopedia called Chinese Wikipedia
to create a free source of information for Chinese
Internet users. Wikipedia's translation, or wiki,
is derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and used
to describe websites that can be edited and augmented by
any viewer, including anonymous visitors. With the
anticipated and exponential growth of China's Internet
users, already in excess of 84 million, this new
easy-to-edit wiki technology is well on its way
to creating a huge universe of connected participatory
new journalists.
Although the Chinese site
reinforces its neutral point of view, and operates on a
small scale, wikipedia.org was inaccessible for about 48
hours in mid-June. During the ban, Wikipedia's founder,
James Wales commented on the event to Chinatechnews: "
When Wikipedia is blocked, it can not be claimed that
only lies or propaganda are blocked, because we are
neither. When we are blocked, it is information itself
that is being blocked."
Chinese media observer
Wu Xu views the overall Internet development in China,
sponsored and encouraged by the central government as
part of China's advancing technology, as a double-edged
sword and says: "However, the real paradox is not so
much about the Western-style democratic appeal as about
the frantic nationalistic sentiment nurtured by the
online chat room discussions," said Wu, the author of
Red Net over China: China's New Online Media Order
and Its Implications.
In an exclusive
interview with Asia Times Online he said, "The most
advanced online network technology may not strike the
democratic nerve among the new generation of Chinese
youngsters, but it surely has awakened the latent
nationalistic pride and civilization awareness. Take a
look at the recent events stirred up by the online
public sphere, such as the spy-plane collision [a US spy
plane collided with a Chinese combat aircraft near
Hainan Island], Taiwan presidential election, and
anti-Japan movement online."
Just as Chinese
reportage in the 1980s provided a rare window on
information and ideas, including rendering dramatic
social critique that had been taboo throughout the
Cultural Revolution, blogs are the millennium's answer
for a new generation of tech-savvy Chinese
intellectuals.
Maybe Liu's - the Stainless Steel
Mouse's - posted call to "ignore government propaganda
and live freely" resonates with more readers than just
China's cyber police.
James Borton is
a freelance journalist and director of Asia Pacific
Projects for Foreign Affairs. He can be reached at
asiareview@yahoo.com.
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