Features

With the news these days constantly filled by reports of governments exercising power and influence over the Internet, Features Editor Loulou Callister-Baker takes a step back to look at a country with years of experience: China.

As a tool for democracy, the Internet is a threat to authoritarian regimes. It is decentralised. It has a non-hierarchical character. But it also has a ubiquitous nature – a far-reaching, everlasting presence – which some may view as power. This is why, in the early stages of the Internet’s commercialisation and public accessibility in China, the Chinese Government’s attitude towards the Internet oscillated between two poles of “explicit support” and “political mistrust.”

However, regardless of the Government’s uncertainty, by June 1998, a national survey showed 1,175,999 Internet users in China. By the end of 2009, this number had exponentially grown to 384 million users. The extreme rate of growth of Internet use and availability in China, as well as the realisation that the Internet “could not be shut off at will” (an early example of this being the fax transmission sent to China by Chinese students abroad to distribute information about the events happening on Tiananmen Square in May and June 1989), forced the Chinese Government to be proactive in setting up an extensive framework of control in order to maintain its authoritarian rule. Defying previous conceptions of what it meant to be online, China created a distinct national Internet.

Since the Internet was first available in China in 1987, the Chinese government has used a multi-layered strategy to control online content and monitor online activities at every level of Internet service. Several political bodies manage this strategy, including: The Central Propaganda Department (which ensures that media and cultural content follows the official line as mandated by the Chinese Communist Party); and the State Council Information Office (which oversees all websites). By employing a huge amount of cyber police, engineers, developers, web monitors and online propagandists to censor and guide Chinese Internet users, the Chinese government has created a virtual “Great Wall.”

Although the precise workings of Internet censorship in China remain unknown, there is a growing understanding of how aspects of censorship are achieved. Gmail (and other Google services), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and thousands of other foreign websites are either firewalled in China or work extremely slowly or only sometimes (unless accessed through means like virtual private networks).

On domestically operated websites like Sina Weibo (China’s biggest commercial microblogging network), government-funded censors delete posts that could be seen as politically incorrect. This is normally done through targeted keyword searches like “Tibet independence” or “Tiananmen Square.” A list obtained by the China Internet Project in Berkeley found that over 1,000 words including “dictatorship,” “truth” and “riot police” are automatically banned. Stemming from this process is the Government’s primary strategy for shaping content, which is to hold Internet service providers and access providers responsible for the behaviour of their customers, which means business operators have little choice but to actively censor content on their sites. Business owners therefore use a combination of their own judgement and direct instructions from propaganda officials to determine what content to ban, therefore establishing their own type of “self-censorship.”

The Chinese Government also enlists individuals, who are sometimes prisoners searching for a means to get their sentences reduced, to write comments and posts in support of the Chinese Communist Party – the group has been called the “50 Cent Party” due to the small sums they receive for their patriotic posts.

If any breaches of censorship or violations of acceptable content occur, website owners hosted inside China can be warned or shut down. Furthermore, individual Internet users who post or distribute information deemed harmful by authorities have been threatened, intimidated, or thrown in jail – most often on national security charges, such as “subversion.” Because of these actions, a range of international organisations and groups have viewed censorship and media restrictions in China negatively. In 2013, the international non-governmental organisation Freedom House ranked China 179 out of 196 countries in terms of press restrictions (the higher the ranking, the more restrictive). Additionally, in a 2011 report to the United Nations by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, great concern for China’s control on the Internet was expressed. The Special Rapporteur was “deeply concerned” with China’s “mechanism used to regulate and censor information on the Internet,” especially as they were becoming “increasingly sophisticated” but still remained largely “hidden from the public.” The Special Rapporteur also expressed concern for the criminalising of legitimate expression online resulting in the imprisonment of bloggers around the world, citing 2010 Reporters Without Borders statistics that showed 72 individuals were imprisoned due to the content of their online expression in China that year.

However, despite the extensive frameworks of censorship established in China, the Internet still has become a central means for civil, social and political exploration for Chinese citizens online (otherwise knows as “netizens”). As Tai Zixue states in his book, The Internet in China, “[b]ecause there is no judicial independence in China and courts often collude with Government officials, Chinese netizens may understandably redress what they perceive as unfair and unjustified by taking issues into the virtual court of appeal on the Internet and thus swaying the tide of public opinion.”

The Internet (despite censorship) allows for the dissemination of information, the organisation of online petitions and offline protests, the extraction of varying degrees of responsiveness and accountability from the authorities, and the affection of government decision-making concerning important social, political, and diplomatic issues. This is because the Internet, as Zixue views it, has “transformed the traditional concept of space by transcending and blurring geographic and political boundaries,” with a “defining feature of cyberspace” being its “spacelessness.” The Internet has thereby empowered individuals, as well as groups, to bypass conventional regulatory mechanisms, established by both China’s government and domestic Chinese Internet companies, by creating a brand new realm of human communication and connection.

The “decentralised nature of cyberspace has tilted the power into the hands of the individuals and marginal social groups” in an array of ways. This has in turn presented, as Zixue observes, “opportunities for activists to form into networks of collective action that would not be possible otherwise.” Similar protests would have been much more difficult to organise in real-world China; it would have also been impossible to organise a protest with such speed and with such popular participation off the Internet. Thus, online activism has become a “revolutionary force” in the evolving dynamics of social (and political) movements in China. This shows the ability of the Internet to connect similarly minded users into collective action. The online world has not only become a place where activists can share news, it is also a forum to exchange views and work out further actions. As Zixue writes, “While conventional media may fulfil a limited function for these purposes, the Internet has surpassed all mass media in that it can bring in massive participation in issues and topics that may lie outside the official agenda.”

The online reaction to the Government and the mainstream media’s involvement with the train incident near Wenzhou, Zhejiang province on 23 July 2011 shows a situation of relative triumph for online civil society in China, as well as the Chinese Government’s inability to censor all online content. The high-speed train collision resulted in the deaths of 40 people and almost 200 injuries. China’s Central Propaganda Department sent directives to the mainstream media to stop coverage – with journalists being told not to “investigate the causes of the accident” or to “question” the official account, it was also explicitly stated that, “[t]here must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed.” Other media orders by the Central Propaganda Department included limiting the coverage to only “positive news or information released by the authorities,” for example, “people donating blood and taxi drivers not accepting fares.” However, the online response to the directives and the further reporting of the incident, including reports on the literal covering up of the derailed train cars, greatly limited the effects of the directives.

In response to the authorities urging reporters to focus on rescue efforts rather than the causes of the crash, one micro-blogger called Kangfu Xiaodingdang wrote, “We have the right to know the truth! [...] That’s our basic right!” One of the most popular comments on Sina Weibo read: “When a country is so corrupt that one lightning strike can cause a train crash … none of us is exempt. China today is a train rushing through a lightning storm … we are all passengers.” Although, like any social media website, the majority of Weibo’s content is apolitical, the reactions to the incident on Weibo, which caused China’s official media to cease from ignoring the incident, shows the possibility of political subversion online where Chinese netizens can demand more Government accountability and transparency.

An earlier established, but still continuing, group that over time has illustrated the effect of the Internet on social movements in China, is the Tiananmen Mother Group. This group consists of parents who lost loved ones during the Tiananmen Square massacre on the eve of 4 June 1989. The group demands accountability from the government despite continuous harassment, threats, surveillance and detainment by the Chinese authorities. The Internet became essential for the Tiananmen Mothers to communicate to the public in China and around the world. It was through this means that the group could publish witness accounts, victim lists, and statements from victims’ parents on the Internet that have been collected by the group over the years. It has also been a medium through which the Tiananmen Mothers can publish their open letters, public statements and news releases over time. This widespread online and offline, national and global, support for the Tiananmen Mothers Group campaign has exerted large pressure on Chinese authorities in how they handle the group. Therefore, when in 2004 three of the Tiananmen Mothers were arrested, the online reaction worldwide to news of the arrest led to their releases in less than a week.

The Xiamen anti-PX protest provides yet another example of an event where an active online civil society in China created real-world impacts. The protest involved tens of thousands (or an estimated amount between 10,000 to 70,000 people) of protesters marching through the streets of Dalian demanding a nearby petrochemical plant be shut down. The event, which lacked the necessary protesting permit, was organised through social media websites such as Sina Weibo and Renren, despite the efforts of censors to remove comments calling for action. The city government, in reaction to demands of accountability, listened to public opinion and adjusted its decision accordingly, which lead to the order of the petrochemical plant to be shut down. The state-run Xinhua News Agency concluded that the eventual construction of the PX plant “may have helped lay a cornerstone that boosts ordinary Chinese people’s participation in policy making.” However, the Xiamen protests are still seen as the exception rather than the rule.

Although the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship of both traditional media and the Internet is certain to continue, the rise of civil societies online in China means that the CCP and the government can no longer maintain absolute control of mass media and communication. These three cases also reveal the emergence and development of a trend of online protesting in China.

The Internet has allowed for an increase in the democratising of communication of information in Chinese society and created a public sphere for Chinese Internet users to engage in public debates on social and political issues, which in some significant cases has extracted a certain level of accountability from the government. These online protests and signatory campaigns are becoming frequent ways for Chinese netizens to express their discontent with the status quo and call for attention from authorities. The Internet has allowed for a growing body of autonomous individuals. It has also changed the traditional role of conventional media in Chinese life. Consumers of media have taken more control in what they want to read about which has led to an increase in human interest stories and social events.

Despite China’s extensive and prolific Internet censorship regime, as Zixue writes, “as the Internet has fundamentally transformed, and will continue to transform, every aspect of Chinese society, the actual course of events may not follow exactly what the Chinese regime has mapped out both in the short term and in the long run.” Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, writing for The Guardian, expresses a sentiment shared by many pro-democratic individuals and groups when he wrote, “China may seem quite successful in its controls, but it has only raised the water level. It’s like building a dam: it thinks there is more water so it will build it higher. But every drop of water is still in there. It doesn’t understand how to let the pressure out. It builds up a way to maintain control and push the problem to the next generation. It still hasn’t come to the moment that it will collapse. That makes a lot of other states admire its technology and methods. But in the long run, its leaders must understand it’s not possible for them to control the [I]nternet unless they shut it off – and they can’t live with the consequences of that. The [I]nternet is uncontrollable. And if the [I]nternet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that.”