China and the Internet

Report by Duncan Stanworth of BBC Monitoring at the "Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom" conference in Paris on 19 April

China is attempting to control its citizens' online activities, while using the internet - including websites in the West - to fight its critics and to spread official ideologies, delegates at the "Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom" conference in Paris have heard.

Richard Winfield, chairman of the World Press Freedom Committee ,said China might be seeking to "re-map the internet in its own image". Beijing, he said, had proposed the adoption of world internet "norms" at the 2007 UN-backed international Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro.

Under the proposals, governments should agree that the web must be regulated via enforceable international standards. Only "trustworthy, valuable" material should be permitted, and "harmful and unhealthy" content blocked, the official Chinese statement had said. Under China's proposed rules for internet governance, those with "ulterior motives" would be barred from the internet, and governments would be able to punish violators. The proposals legitimized censorship and oppression, Winfield said.

Tactics and tools

China is "the world's most pervasive filterer", said Prof Ronald Deibert of the University of Toronto, co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), an academic joint venture which monitors and documents internet censorship free from government interference.

China's filtering tactics are centralized and consistent, usually involving domain name system (DNS) filtering (a redirecting mechanism); internet protocol (IP) address blocking (which can lead to the mass blocking of sites that share the same IP); and keyword filtering, which detects certain words in a site's URL, Deibert said. A slow unblocking of English-language sites - including the BBC News website - is under way in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. However, local-language sites will remain blocked, he predicted. Savvy web users can overcome DNS filtering by using numerical versions of URLs, or by accessing public proxy servers. The latter can be insecure, so ONI has created Psiphon, an encrypted web proxy system. It allows surfers in a country where the internet is filtered to call up web pages via a trusted computer in another country. Deibert described it as a tool that can be used within "social networks of trust" - among friends and family, for instance.

Citizen journalists

"China cannot control the flow of information anymore," said Watson Meng, founding editor of the US-based Chinese news site Boxun. The site - which hosts more than 2,000 blogs - was blocked by the Chinese authorities within two months of its launch in 2000.

Boxun's contributors include citizen journalists within China, who report on incidents that the official media ignore, including accidents, protests and police violence.Their activities can be risky. Watson told delegates about the arrests of husband-and-wife team Sun Lin and He Fang, whose online video reports had angered the authorities. He said the world could help China's citizen reporters by funding defence lawyers and by offering financial support to journalists' families.

Yu Zhang of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre - a body set up by Chinese writers in exile - said a recent fall in the rate of convictions for dissent on the internet masked a stepping up of regulation. China has an internet police force. This agency is formally known as the "Special Police for Internet Security Inspection", and is tasked with enforcing the rigid rules in China's web environment. Some estimates put its strength at up to 50,000.

"More worrying than censorship"

China is trying to export its ideologies by using foreign, Western-facing websites, said Julien Pain, from France 24 TV.

He cited an online campaign for a boycott of the French supermarket chain Carrefour, after the troubled passage of the Olympic torch through Paris. "You had the impression [through the web comments] that China had won the argument," he said.

Comments

[K L Young]

To the West: When you try to discuss human rights with China, don't forget you are talking to a society which used to kill the baby girls [especially the first born]. Human rights mean nothing to most of Chinese inside China. It is a completely different culture from the rest of the world. They really don't know what exactly you are protesting about, so they take it as the West against Chinese just as the imperial West against the Boxer of Chin dynasty in 1800s.