Cyber-Censorship Grows in East Asia

While debate has raged in this country over Washington’s abortive attempts to regulate “indecent” material on the Internet, even more far-reaching efforts by East Asian governments to censor opposing political views in cyberspace are quietly beginning to take hold.

This month, the Singapore Broadcasting Authority took steps to ban “subversive” Internet content that might “incite disaffection against the government.” Also this month, China implemented technology that blocks access to hundreds of Internet sites in a campaign against what the government calls “spiritual pollution.” In Vietnam, government officials cited “the cultural aspect” of the Internet as grounds for severely limiting nationwide access to the information superhighway.

East Asian governments often have gone to great lengths to quash dissenting opinion in the print and broadcast media. Freedom House’s 1996 Survey of Press Freedom ranks media in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Burma, North Korea and China as “not free.” In these countries, journalists frequently encounter harassment, censorship and even physical violence when they write on subjects that displease the ruling regimes.

For a while, however, it looked like the Internet would provide a voice for those silenced by government censors. Especially in technologically advanced yet politically repressive countries like Singapore, the Internet provided a crucial end-run around government censorship of the print and broadcast media.

Last year, when Williams College decided to award an honorary degree to its alumnus, Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, a lively international debate broke out over Singapore’s “soft authoritarian” style of government. Not surprisingly, state-controlled media gave a notably slanted treatment to most outspoken critics of Goh’s administration, including dissident Singaporean politicians, American academics and columnist William Safire. Lee Hsien Loong, then deputy prime minister, later claimed that the government would have taken the dissenters to court had they made their remarks within the island-state.

To learn the salient details of this debate and to air their views in an atmosphere of freedom unavailable elsewhere, many Singaporeans turned to World Wide Web sites and to Internet discussion groups, where arguments from both sides were reprinted in full. Internet reporting of the controversy became so popular in Singapore that Goh’s administration began issuing statements in both the traditional media and on the Internet regarding the topics raised in chat groups and web sites.

In the future, unfortunately, Singapore will most likely be denied this kind of balanced debate. In mid-September, Singaporeans began receiving their connection to the information superhighway from “proxy servers,” machines that automatically ban all material ruled objectionable by the government.

Less than two weeks before Singapore’s move, China blocked access to an even wider range of Internet sites. To a regime clearly opposed to freedom of expression in virtually any form, the Internet poses a host of dangers. “By linking [China] with the Internet, we do not mean the absolute freedom of information” was how China’s telecommunications minister put it. All Internet information going to China must pass through one of several “choke points” that are now programmed to block out virtually any Internet source that may contradict state-sponsored media.

While Singapore and China are currently the most aggressive censors of online content in East Asia, a meeting of ASEAN nations this month on how to best police the Internet sounds an ominous signal. Although a unified approach to censoring Internet content was not decided on, ASEAN agreed that ways must be found to combat the “perils” to Southeast Asian nations’ tight press controls posed by “this dynamic and boundless medium.” Only the Philippines dissented.

In East Asian nations where concrete steps to ban political dissent in cyberspace have not yet been enacted, political use of the Internet continues to thrive.

In a region already plagued by severely limited political expression in the traditional media, the Internet remains the last tool for exchanging information that is untouched by politically motivated censorship. If it is to remain so, the international community must raise its voice in condemnation now. To fail to act would be to allow “this dynamic and boundless medium” to be silenced just as its potential for promoting free political expression is beginning to be realized.