Saturday, Dec 14, 2002

Contrary to popular wisdom, Chinese efforts to control the Internet and other new media are not doomed to fail. China's government has lost much control over the information and images that now circulate through Chinese society, but it still is capable of preventing any serious challenger from using the media to attack it. How can this be?

The government demands that Web sites, television programs and other media meet three general criteria.

First, they must support, or at least not hinder, China's efforts to sustain economic growth, maintain social order, unify with Taiwan and secure international respect;

Second, they must support, or at least not question, the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power.

Third, they must oppose such "negative" social phenomena as "spiritual pollution" (for example, pornography and drug abuse), "bourgeois liberalization" (Western-style democratization), "feudal superstition" (the Falun Gong [Exercise] and other proscribed religions) and "worship of things foreign" (especially American popular culture).

The government's tools for enforcing these criteria are far more effective than most observers realize. First, it can imprison those who violate its media policy. For example, in 1998 it sentenced a Shanghai engineer to two years in prison for selling 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to an overseas-based dissident newsletter. In March last year, it launched a general crackdown on Internet dissent that resulted in numerous people being imprisoned and harassed.

Second, the government can use technical means to deny people access to undesired content. It has jammed Voice of America broadcasts since June 1989 and in the spring of last year began jamming Tibetan-, Uighur- and Kazakh-language broadcasts from India and Central Asia. It blocks Chinese Internet surfers from visiting a list of banned Web sites and late last summer it blocked access to the Google and AltaVista search engines. More recently, it developed a new system that allows surfers to access some sections of formerly banned sites, but deploys packet-sniffing technology to deny access to other sections.

Third, the government enlists cooperation from foreign businesses in exchange for exclusive access to China's gigantic market. Just as the government persuaded Rupert Murdoch to remove BBC News from STAR-TV in 1994, it convinced Yahoo this year to design a special search engine for China that screens out Web sites dealing with unacceptable subjects. Companies such as Cisco have been accused of providing the government with advanced technologies designed to make the "Great Internet Firewall" leak-proof.

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http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2002/12/14/187161