Battle Heats Up Over Chinese Censorship

Just before Chinese New Year, Beijing shuttered Freezing Point, among China’s most well-regarded and courageous publications.

Editors believed the move was timed to bury news of the crackdown. If so, it didn’t work for long.

In a letter made public Tuesday, 13 former Chinese officials and senior scholars denounced the shutdown, saying, “History demonstrates that only a totalitarian system needs news censorship, out of the delusion that it can keep the public locked in ignorance.”

Those who signed the letter, dated Feb. 2, included Li Rui, Mao Tse-tung’s secretary; Hu Jiwei, a former editor of the official People’s Daily newspaper; and Zhu Houze, a former propaganda boss.

The public battle over censorship of Freezing Point, a China Youth Daily supplement, was just one element of China’s effort to control information.

Around the same time it shut Freezing Point, Beijing handed down a three-year sentence to journalist Li Changqing for providing “alarmist information” to an overseas website. It released a report card on its own censorship activities in which it boasted of banning 79 newspapers last year.

This month, Wu Xianghu, deputy editor at the Taizhou Wanbao newspaper, died after being severely beaten by police angered by an expose.

And Google Inc. announced last month that it would self-censor searches on its Chinese Internet browser in line with Propaganda Department guidelines.

Freezing Point ran afoul of authorities with a number of stories, including one that criticized what it called distortions in Chinese textbooks. Several lawyers, journalists and intellectuals called for its reinstatement before the Tuesday letter was released.

In the letter, the 13 former officials and scholars said, “Depriving the public of freedom of expression so nobody dares speak out will sow the seeds of disaster for political and social transition.”

Other aspects of China’s grip on information draw equal criticism.

The State Department said Tuesday that it had created the Global Internet Freedom Task Force to urge more openness in China and other countries, and to help U.S. companies decide how to respond to information requests that may result in punishment for dissenters.

China argues that it is not a heavy censor. In the official China Daily, Liu Zhengrong, an Internet overseer, said today, “No one in China has been arrested simply because he or she said something on the Internet.” He maintained that China blocked only a few foreign sites.

The U.S. Congress’ Subcommittee on Global Human Rights, Africa and International Operations is holding a hearing today on “The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?” Executives from Google, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are scheduled to testify, along with representatives from Reporters Without Borders.

The Internet giants think it’s worth trying to navigate the complex political minefield because there’s big money at stake. An estimated 110 million to 120 million Chinese are online, making it the world’s second-biggest Internet market.

“It is the single most important market and single most important strategy for Internet companies for the next 10 years,” said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at the Piper Jaffray investment bank.

Google and other Internet companies already censor results in other countries: Links to Nazi-related paraphernalia are generally removed in Germany and France. The companies even block links in the U.S. when someone complains that the pages violate copyright laws.

“It is a business, and you have to follow the rule of law in the country in which you’re operating,” Rashtchy said.

A search for “Tibet independence” on Google.com pulls up 1.5 million entries, compared with 640,000 on the new Chinese site Google.cn or just 2,500 among Chinese-language websites. A request for “Tiananmen” on Google.com pulls up 25.9 million hits, whereas a Google.cn search for “six-four,” the Chinese term for June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, pulls up 37,000 entries.

Google.com is accessible in China, but attempting to pull up the websites listed frequently results in a screen that says, “The page can not be displayed.”

Although China has defied critics who thought each new technology would overwhelm its controls, some see a growing edginess in Beijing’s tactics.

“I think the government is getting increasingly desperate,” said Bill Xia, head of North Carolina-based Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that provides Chinese computer users with technology to circumvent Internet filters. “They’re pushing the domestic media and outside companies to openly collaborate with them. They’re summoning all their potential partners.”

Google has fought for a modicum of high ground -- if for no other reason than to blunt charges of hypocrisy at a company whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil” -- by waiting longer than rivals Yahoo and Microsoft to enter China’s market.

It has stopped short of offering e-mail or blog services on Chinese-hosted servers, two areas in which a company’s cooperation with the state would be most likely to land Chinese users in jail. And Google discloses that it filters out sites. A notice at the bottom of the Google.cn search page says: “In accordance with local laws, rules and policies, some search results have not been displayed.”

Although Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN also filter terms, they collaborate more directly. Shi Tao, a journalist with Contemporary Trade News, received a 10-year prison sentence last year for sending e-mail that Yahoo helped track. In December, MSN shut down a blog by Zhou Jing, known as Michael Anti, at the bidding of censors. Both companies said they were only following local laws.

Google argues that some information is better than none.

“Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission,” Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel, wrote in a posting on the corporate Web log last month. “Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely.”

Not everyone is buying that argument. Derisive variations on Google’s logo, replacing the company name with “Goolag” and “Gagged,” have circulated widely on the Internet, and protesters have picketed Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Analysts differ on how much leverage Google has as China’s No. 2 search engine behind homegrown rival Baidu.com Inc., and whether it could have held out for fewer restrictions.

In an ideal world, multinationals would marry social values with profits, critics say, not trip over each other to enter China on Beijing’s terms.

“I have to tell you, when it comes to American Chamber of Commerce companies in China, human rights is simply not an issue,” said the China head of one U.S. company, requesting anonymity. “ ... It’s mostly about stock prices and profits. It’s rather depressing.”

This month, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco, which makes much of the equipment China employs for filtering, declined to appear at a voluntary meeting of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a precursor to today’s formal hearings.

“Companies that have blossomed and make billions in this country, a country that reveres freedom of speech, have chosen to ignore that core value in expanding their reach overseas, and to erect a Great Firewall to suit Beijing’s purposes,” said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame).

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) is drafting legislation that would bar U.S. Internet companies from blocking search results anywhere in the world.

Others prefer voluntary industry guidelines.

“I’m not sure what congressional intervention would look like,” said Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton University. “It seems like a fairly blunt instrument.”

A starting point for an industry response may be new censorship guidelines Microsoft released this month, an apparent reaction to criticism it received after shutting down Michael Anti’s blog. These include a commitment to censor blogger content only if served with a legally binding notice.

Even as China chills debate, filters out dissenting views and harasses or imprisons critics, many observers believe it eventually will lose the information battle.

“I don’t think they are winning because deep in Chinese people’s hearts, they don’t agree or obey,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a Beijing lawyer and free-speech advocate. “Ultimately, the authorities can’t win with these sorts of tactics.”

That hasn’t stopped Beijing from trying, however. Even as China relies primarily on persuasion and economic leverage when dealing with foreign companies, it’s content to use more sticks at home and fewer carrots.

The Communist Party has also been very successful at marshaling users, local prosecutors, technicians, commercial providers and as many as 30,000 cyber-cops into a flexible, relatively adaptive control structure.

“China’s put up an awfully good fight by enlisting people all along the Internet chain to do its bidding,” said John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “If China tried to do it at one central point, it wouldn’t succeed.”

Times staff writer Chris Gaither in San Francisco and Ding Li in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.