Page 2 of
2 SPEAKING
FREELY Cracking
China's Great Firewall By
Richard Daniel Ewing
China bans
independent labor unions, monitors activists, and
prevents unsanctioned protests.
Not one to
ignore the lessons of the past, the CCP is acutely
focused on managing social unrest. Throughout
Chinese history, popular uprisings have marked the
end of numerous Chinese dynasties. The 1989
Tiananmen Square demonstrators provoked
the
wrath of the party once workers and other groups
joined the students, and the cause spread to
cities around the country. Similarly, the
government's struggle against the Falungong for
the past eight years has much to do with the
group's organizational capabilities and
willingness to oppose the party.
More
recently, however, the government's approach to
social protest appears to have changed. Rather
than forcefully suppress protests, the government
is frequently containing demonstrations and
attacking its organizational core. China's labor
unrest is the clearest example of this strategy in
action. In 2002, massive protests rocked China's
rustbelt in Liaoyang province and Daqing city in
Heilongjiang province.
While the
government did not actively quell the
demonstrations, it did contain them and arrested
organizers to prevent them from connecting and
forming national movements. Rand analyst Murray
Scott Tanner notes that as the government "shifts
tactics from a strategy of deterrence and quick
suppression to a more permissive strategy of
containment and management, they are facing
trickier dilemmas than ever before".
One
of those dilemmas is the growing ability to
organize and coordinate brought on by modern
technology. Mobile phones, for example, played a
major organizing role in the anti-Japanese student
protests in April 2005. The Internet, however, is
the most important technological change facing
Beijing, which has responded by constructing "the
Great Firewall of China".
Today, Internet
censorship in China basically operates as a screen
intercepting the flow of information between the
users (you and me) and the content providers. In
particular, Internet censorship, or the "Great
Firewall", is occurring in three main ways.
First, authorities block access to
specific websites. Typically, the government will
block websites that offer material critical of the
government (such as the New York Times, Voice of
America). Second, the government makes
search-engine companies such asYahoo, MSN and
Baidu alter search results for key words so that
searchers never find certain information. The
Western press, for example, criticized Google for
changing its search results in China to prevent
access to government-censored information.
Third, the government applies pressure on
content providers to self-censor material. By
arresting non-compliant Internet providers, they
scare others into filtering their own content (as
in the Chinese aphorism "Kill the chicken to
frighten the monkey"). This is probably the most
pervasive form of censorship in China today.
From this perspective, Web 2.0 presents
new challenges to the Chinese government. At its
core, social-networking technology lets
individuals find one another based on interests
and it links communities together across
geography. These networks gather information,
filter it, process it, and amplify or dampen it as
they send it through the system.
Web 2.0
provides several new dynamics. First, these sites
are massively scalable, quickly and easily
allowing ten of thousands of users to access the
same people and content instantly. Second, the
information is constantly changing and is
therefore nearly impossible to filter real-time.
For example, an online community may be focused on
an obscure interest such as Irish pastries, but
they can just as easily discuss current events
such as Paris Hilton's arrest or the war in Iraq.
Last, Web 2.0 users and online video-game
players are mostly young urban Chinese and
students - historically China's most politically
activist segment. Students, for example, sparked
the May 4th Movement in 1919, they were the motive
force of the Cultural Revolution, and they led the
protests at Tiananmen.
In combination, the
scalable platforms and rapidly changing content
make it difficult to monitor and police behavior.
From lewd photos loaded on to Craigslist to
vandalism on Wikipedia, website administrators can
mostly just quickly repair the site content. These
virtual worlds and social networks therefore can
provide platforms or channels for unexpected
issues to spread like wildfire. The "Jianye"
incident exemplifies this trend - the users
primarily focus on enjoying the game, but can
quickly spark an issue that sweeps the group and
organize thousands.
The flowering of Web
2.0 sites, social networking, and user-generated
content has governments around the world
scratching their heads on how to accommodate these
new technologies. As Eric Schmidt, Google's chief,
noted in an interview with Thomas Friedman, "The
most interesting question is how this technology
will effect 'less democratic' political processes
... [because it is] essentially impossible to shut
down."
In Thailand, for example, the
government blocked YouTube because of videos
disparaging His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
The government of Bahrain blocked Google Earth's
mapping site after a surge of criticism over the
satellite images of opulent royal residences. And
finally, the US military has taken a more
complicated approach to social-networking sites.
While it launched its own YouTube channel to
promote the military, it also blocked US soldiers'
access to MySpace and YouTube on its servers in
May.
Where does Web 2.0 go in China? The
appeal of web-based communities and user-generated
content appears widespread, if not universal.
These Internet communities may provide the new
public squares for discussion, dissent and
demonstration. The most likely scenario is that
Web 2.0 will remain a murky place.
While
it grows in popularity, users will participate in
a rich and expanding pool of self-generated
content. These virtual communities and social
networks should propel the development of civil
society in China greatly over the coming years. On
the other hand, the government will likely
restrict such sites as Flickr from posting
sensitive content such as demonstrations or
protests.
Web 2.0 sites will also come
under pressure to screen content for politically
sensitive material - a practice already widely in
place. And the government could use the
applications to monitor online activities and
networks, as it has reportedly done using data
from Yahoo in China to jail Chinese reporter Shi
Tao.
Nevertheless, the Internet's most
basic premise is to connect people and ideas to
one another. As the Jianye incident exemplifies,
the evolution of technology and user interactions
make social and political developments hard to
predict and control. The millions of online gaming
communities with their virtual knights, trolls and
ogres are an early indicator that Web 2.0 and the
next wave of Internet evolution will put
significant cracks in the Great Firewall of China.
Richard Daniel Ewing is a
consultant based in San Francisco. The views
expressed in this article are solely his own.
(Copyright 2007 Richard Daniel Ewing.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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