China’s Censors Tackle and Trip Over the Internet
An Internet cafe in Beijing. Some Internet cafes and schools use filtering software, and a version for cellphones is in development
BEIJING — Type the Chinese characters for “carrot” into Google’s search engine here in mainland China, and you will be rewarded not with a list of Internet links, but a blank screen.
Don’t blame Google, however. The fault lies with China’s censors — who are increasingly a model for countries around the world that want to control an unrestricted Internet.
Since late March, when Google moved its search operations out of mainland China to Hong Kong, each response to a Chinese citizen’s search request has been met at the border by government computers, programmed to censor any forbidden information Google might turn up.
“Carrot” — in Mandarin, huluobo — may seem innocuous enough. But it contains the same Chinese character as the surname of President Hu Jintao. And the computers, long programmed to intercept Chinese-language searches on the nation’s leaders, substitute an error message for the search result before it can sneak onto a mainland computer.
This is China’s censorship machine, part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg: an information sieve of staggering breadth and fineness, yet full of holes; run by banks of advanced computers, but also by thousands of Communist Party drudges; highly sophisticated in some ways, remarkably crude in others.
The one constant is its growing importance. Censorship used to be the sleepy province of the Communist Party’s central propaganda department, whose main task was to tell editors what and what not to print or broadcast. In the new networked China, censorship is a major growth industry, overseen — and fought over — by no fewer than 14 government ministries.
“Press control has really moved to the center of the agenda,” said David Bandurski, an analyst at the China Media Project of the University of Hong Kong. “The Internet is the decisive factor there. It’s the medium that is changing the game in press control, and the party leaders know this.”
Today, China censors everything from the traditional print press to domestic and foreign Internet sites; from cellphone text messages to social networking services; from online chat rooms to blogs, films and e-mail. It even censors online games.
That’s not all. Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.
The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.
The government makes no apologies for what it calls “guiding public opinion.” Regulation is crucial, it says, to keep China from sliding into chaos and to preserve the party’s monopoly on power.
“Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state,” President Hu said in 2007.
In China’s view, events since then — including the online spread of the democracy manifesto known as Charter 08 and riots in the Tibet and Xinjiang regions, said to be aided by cellphone and Internet communications — have only reinforced that stance.
In the last year, censorship has increased markedly, as evidenced by the closing of thousands of blogs and Web sites in ostensible anti-pornography campaigns, and the jailing of prominent dissidents who used the Internet to spread their views. The departure of Google’s search engine in March only capped months of growing intolerance of unfettered speech.
The paradox — at least at first glance — is that even with such pervasive restraints, China’s press and Internet are capable of freewheeling discourse and social criticism.
Newspapers, blogs and online chats have unleashed national outrages over a host of topics, including food and medicine contamination and local corruption. Bloggers continually tweak the censors, leaking their orders and creating an online land of mythical creatures whose names are all homonyms for aspects of the state’s heavy hand.
Some exposés and satires fall on the acceptable side of an often invisible and shifting line that marks what can and cannot be said freely in China. On the other side are statements that too overtly challenge the Communist Party’s hold on power, that attack or embarrass powerful politicians or that tread on a long list of forbidden topics, from unrest in Tibet to political crises like the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Journalists and Internet publishers often discover that they have crossed the line only after their online presence is blocked, their bylines are blacklisted or they are detained or summoned to “tea” with government security officers who deliver coy but unmistakable warnings.
With 384 million users in China at last count in January — and 181 million blogs — the Internet poses a true cat-herding predicament for censors. Foreign entities that operate outside China are the lesser of the censors’ problems. The reason is logistical: access to the Internet in China from the outside world is limited, and all traffic must pass through one of three large computer centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
At those centers, government computers — the so-called Great Firewall — intercept inbound data and compare it with a constantly changing list of forbidden keywords and Web addresses.
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