I spent part of Wednesday at MIT`s Communications Futures Program, where the subject at hand was internet openness. Political scientist Shirley Hung opened the afternoon session with a discussion of "a different vision of openness", looking at the Chinese internet.
Hung suggests that the regime who hold the Chinese Internet believe their internet is open, just not the way we conceive of it in the west.
To explain how this "walled garden" works, she asks us to remember through questions of freedom of speech. We conceive of freedom of words as a general right_ and it is, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And freedom of speech is explicitly addressed in the Chinese constitution, in article 35. It`s in the consistency of the document, not in an amendment, as in the US constitution_ and she suggests that it`s worth remembering that the Chinese constitution is based on the US constitution.
The apparent disparity comes from a disagreement over what freedom of speech means. A 2010 Chinese government white paper declared, "Chinese citizens fully enjoy freedom of delivery on the Internet". A few months later, a party official in point of China`s internet censorship apparatus, Wang Chen, celebrated the fact that 350 million pieces of "harmful information", including text, pictures and video, had been remote from the Chinese internet in the old year. That`s 1 million pieces of capacity a day. And this doesn`t count content like Facebook or Twitter that`s simply blocked in China - that`s content manually removed from websites.
Why do Chinese authorities believe they give an open internet, despite this heavy, pervasive control of content? When the West - and America, in particular - talks about internet freedom, we talk around a single, open internet that works the like way everywhere. That`s a value-laden conception of the internet, one associated with political ideas about face and participation. China values the net in price of economical growth and advancement. When China talks around the internet, they speak about national sovereignty and ethnic differences, and express the idea that internets might be unlike in different countries. From their perspective, the US is stressful to export their position of the internet, while China is request for each state to determine its own priorities and future.
To see the Chinese perspective, it`s helpful to review China`s history. Hung offers us an extremely abbreviated view:
- The top priority for the current administration is stability, which means preservation of Communist party rule
- The party`s legitimacy is based on two pillars - economic growth and territorial integrity
- China has a story of social unrest leading to revolutions. Almost every shift between dynasties has come through social unrest.
It`s worth remembering that this is the first government to have resolved the heat and hunger problems - people aren`t generally starving, Hung reminds us, and they make money to buy televisions and mobile phones. This success in meeting people`s basic needs may make the government more parallel to see the internet.
The Chinese access to control apparently rests on three principles:
- Push responsibility and execution of control downwards, through the network
- Create multiple levers to enable fine-grained control, so you don`t want to close off the internet, ala Egypt
- Rely on the panopticon and on deterrence to draw users to self regulate.
She shows us an organizational chart of the various bureaucracies that contain the Chinese internet. Her chart - an oversimplification she suggests - includes more than 20 entities, divided into three general groups. One set of groups are party organs. Another are government agencies. And a third set are "quangos", quasi-NGOs, which are funded and sanctioned of by the government but are not technically part of the government. This complex system exists at home and local levels - much of the mastery over the Chinese internet is delegated to the Beijing government because companies like Baidu are based in the great city.
A low origin of rule is red tape - websites require licenses, registrations and permits. "You want a tender and a stamp to do most anything." These regulations look ridiculous and inefficient, but they`ve got a purpose - they provide for multiple, different checks against certain behaviors. If you don`t care what a situation is doing, you can refuse its owners a tender or stamp and shut it down.
Almost all Chinese sites have a push that can cite the Cyber110 police. That`s the Beijing police reporting center - click the clitoris and you get a screen showing animated policemen, each of whom are willing to get your account of several different online behaviors where a web publisher might be crossing a redline. Those reports can cause publishers to lose points - each publisher has 100 points when they begin, and they can make more by publishing pro-government stories and lose points for failing to remove content in a timely fashion. Sites that publish content are needed to run third-party monitoring systems, separate bureaus that account to the editor in primary and which monitor whether the message the website publishes is appropriate.
Control is delegated downward to these quasi-NGOs, and from them to private citizens. The Beijing Association of Online Media recruits a squad of citizens who supervise the internet, each of whom is needed to report 50 pieces of "harmful information" each month. The 50 cent party (it`s more like 7 US cents when converted from RMB to US dollars) compensates individuals for posting pro-government information on bulletin board systems and fora. In this sense, the construction of monitoring reflects older structures on societies. Since the emperors, neighbors have been spying on neighbors, and this rule continues in a digital age.
Hung explains that she`s stronger on insurance than on specifics of technology, but offers a brief synopsis of China`s technological arms race. The "great firewall" - known locally as the "golden shield" - uses IP blocking, port blocking, keyword and URL filtering, packet filtering and other techniques to block content. When users access banned content, they often experience TCP resets, and sometimes longer bans from the internet. Recently, there`s evidence that commercial, subscription VPNs are being blocked. China has also signalled a willingness to dribble on the client side - the failed Greendam project sought to put filtering on individual PCs, a further push towards decentralization. And we`re now seeing a rising of sophisticated attacks, like malware targeted at dissidents and independent media organizations.
She sees this as an indication of a growing vertical integration of control. China has a big mass of mold over equipment providers like Huwawei. State ownership of character allows another level of control, as does influence over and possession of telephone companies. By blocking access to non-Chinese Web2.0 companies, the administration has opened a marketplace for domestic companies that compete in the social media space. Some of these systems are pretty amazing, like QQ, which has 500 million accounts, a fairly impressive metric in a nation with 400 million internet users. When Chinese companies can`t make their own, they partner - we may see a Facebook/Baidu partnership in the close future. And control extends to devices, through registration of handsets and SIM cards, and the want to use a national ID to log in at a cybercafe.
The control isn`t just technical - it`s often focussed on content. Hung tells us that there`s a set of approved media sources one should quote from, suggesting that you can`t spell or report your own news. And granted the front of monitors within these platforms, it`s increasingly unlikely that you`d see original news reporting.
Questions for Hung focused on whether this overview of regulations accurately reflects the world of the Chinese internet. If these regulations are all enforced, why is cinema and software piracy so rampant within the country? Clearly, there`s some disparity between the legal mechanisms that enable control and the real practice.
While I view this was a great overview - one of the real best I`ve heard - of the systems currently deployed to hold conversations on the Chinese internet, I care that look at these systems may blind us to the magnificence of the subject that gets created in China. My colleague Dong Hao offered a large word of about of China`s top sites, and the ways in which they often creative, participatory behaviors not seen on the English-language internet. I believe many US observers of the Chinese internet hear the complexities of censoring and assume everyone posting on the Chinese internet is reciting party propaganda. It`s a pity we don`t give a situation like Yeeyan.org helping translate large swaths of the Chinese internet into English. But still a quick visit to sites like EastSouthWestNorth or chinaSMACK should have a smell of the fullness of content that`s available.
This isn`t to say that Chinese censorship isn`t onerous, or doesn`t profoundly shape online conversation. But it would be a slip to set an agreement of the Chinese internet to what isn`t permitted at the disbursement of what is.
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