China Goes One-on-One With the Net

Call it the ultimate test of Internet freedom: the world’s largest state security network deployed to police cyberspace in the most populous nation on Earth, where the number of online users is growing exponentially.

The outcome will dictate how one-fifth of mankind relates to a technology that many are convinced owns the future.

Most of those watching the struggle unfold in mainland China believe that the sheer growth of online users in the country--expected to top 100 million well before mid-decade--will eventually overwhelm even the most comprehensive authoritarian efforts to regulate the Internet.

But they note two important caveats: If it does come, a free Internet in China will, in all likelihood, not lead to political upheaval and democratic revolution, as some in the West assume. Instead, it will be a vehicle for gradual, quiet yet profound social change.

And contrary to the belief of many Americans who smirk at the very idea of any government trying to control the Internet, the battle now underway in China is no laughing matter for the forces of free expression.

Just ask Lin Hai.

Lin, a 31-year-old computer engineer from Shanghai, was sentenced to 18 months in jail in early 1999 for passing e-mail addresses to a banned Chinese Web site. He’s far from the only such victim.

A young Web site owner in Sichuan province named Huang Qi was arrested last June for allegedly posting articles about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on the Internet, and human rights advocates in Hong Kong say he remains in custody awaiting trial. As police descended on his home, he signed off with the matter-of-fact message: “Thanks to everybody devoted to democracy in China. They are here now. So long.”

Ironically, some of America’s most successful high-tech companies are selling the Chinese government software that helps its security forces troll cyberspace for material deemed subversive or antisocial.

Beijing also has other formidable weapons of control in its arsenal.

Among them:

* Employing raw intimidation, such as high-profile arrests of Internet users and police raids on Internet cafes, where large numbers of Chinese sign on.

* Closing down suspect Web sites inside China and blocking foreign ones that carry material critical of the government.

* Invoking strict limits on online news, including requiring Web sites to get their news from state media.

* Outlawing material judged a threat to state security or harmful to national unity.

Beijing just last month imposed its latest wave of restrictions--including a ban on using the Internet to organize or coordinate the activities of what it termed “evil cults,” a measure apparently aimed at containing the activities of such groups as the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Even with these measures, China’s cyber-cops can’t claim total control. But so far it seems enough.

With the notable exception of one large street demonstration staged in Beijing by the members of the since-outlawed Falun Gong in April 1999, there is little evidence that dissidents or other groups have successfully used the Internet to organize anti-government activities.

The great enemy of those seeking to control the Internet is its growth--a growth fueled largely by the recognition among China’s reformers that they have no choice but to embrace the Internet if they are to compete in the global marketplace.

Qian Xiaoqian, head of the Internet Affairs Office at the State Council’s Office of Information in Beijing, offers some startling figures: From only a few thousand online users when the Internet first became available in China five years ago, the number has grown to 21.4 million.

Moreover, the number of domain names registered in China has quadrupled during the past three years to 115,000, while the number of active Web sites increased from 1,500 to 33,050 during the same period. If this growth continues at its current pace, China will have an online population of more than 100 million within a few years and become the world’s largest user nation soon after that.

“Security agencies are spending millions of dollars to buy the latest technologies, but how can they keep track of volumes like that?” asked Sin Chung-kai, a member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council who represents the territory’s information-technology industrial sector. “When the number of users goes over 100 million, the political environment will change.”

However, Sin and others predict that this would not lead directly to the fall of China’s Communist leadership. One important reason: China’s Internet growth today is not driven by pro-democracy activists such as Lin Hai and Huang Qi. Instead, its heroes are apolitical--individuals like 33-year-old Zhu Haijun, a frenetic writer who bombarded the literary magazine Tian Ya (Boundless Sky) with as many as 30 essays a day before collapsing dead at his keyboard of a heart attack in October, to the shock of his many fans.

A memorial Web site drew 7,000 letters mourning his passing.

Charles Zhang, a thirtysomething, skateboarding cyber-guru, has used his American college education to become founder and CEO of China’s largest Internet portal, Sohu.com.

Today, Zhang’s venture claims 11 million users, a daily “hit” rate of about 90 million page views and a listing on the Nasdaq (stock symbol: SOHU). Recently, the government granted Sohu the right to carry news developments, a first for a commercial site in China.

While Zhang is proud that his portal now offers about 1,000 news items daily, including stories from the Dow Jones financial wire, he also knows that he must operate within the boundaries set by the state, whether they’re on the news items he posts or the chat rooms and message boards carried on the site.

“We want to give people the right to say what they want, but we agreed with the government that it be properly managed,” Zhang said in an interview. “We can’t prevent messages on hot topics from being displayed, but we can react quickly and move to delete them.”

When a user recently posted a pro-Falun Gong home page on the Web site, it was gone in minutes.

Despite these constraints, Zhang believes that the Internet is quietly helping nudge the limits of free speech in China.

“Five years ago, many topics discussed on the Internet were not politically correct--high-level corruption, homosexuality, even pollution,” he said. “People’s tolerance for these topics has increased.”

In a study of dictatorial governments in the digital age appearing in the online publication iMP: The Magazine on Information Impacts, a trio of American scholars found little evidence that the Internet has undermined authoritarian regimes.

One of the authors, Shanthi Kalathil of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., said “it’s partly wishful thinking and partly anecdotal knowledge that people have used fax machines to organize and they figure the Internet is a much more powerful tool.”

Popular belief has led some to falsely credit the Internet with an important role in such events as the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe or the student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, both of which occurred in 1989. In fact, the Internet played no significant role in either.

Western political analysts also frequently share another false belief: that the Internet everywhere is just as it is in the United States, a symbol of freedom of expression and a tool of empowerment that allows a few college kids with a clever idea to stand a multibillion-dollar business on its head, as the youthful founders of Napster did with their ability to offer high-quality music at a fraction of its retail cost.

The history--and the image--of China’s Internet development could not be more different. In China, the Net was born under state control and remains very much there despite its impressive growth and its increased commercialization.

Today, the state owns the telecommunications system through which the Internet operates, and it controls all of China’s Internet domain names, limits international Internet connections to a select few state-owned bodies and holds providers criminally responsible for what they post.

While it is relatively easy for savvy Internet users in China to maneuver their way to foreign Web sites blocked by the government--including those of such news organizations as the Los Angeles Times--observers insist that that fact is not especially significant.

Chinese authorities, they say, exert their control over online users today as much by simple intimidation as by sophisticated electronic surveillance or by blocking direct access to politically suspect foreign Web sites.

Last month in Beijing, for example, police briefly shut down a large Internet cafe near the city’s main university with an aggressive, high-profile raid, then brought in their own computer specialists to check just who was looking at what. Because cafe owners are required to keep a register of users, identifying anyone who had peered at an illegal site was not hard.

To extend the threat of arrest beyond the terrified people caught in the raid, it was given prominent coverage in state-run media.

Such tactics, combined with the knowledge that the government now has monitoring technology that can pluck key words such as “Taiwan” or “Falun Gong” out of an e-mail, serve as a hefty deterrent.

“If the thought that they cannot possibly read every e-mail message gives you comfort, keep this in mind: they don’t need to,” noted University of Massachusetts political scientist Kathleen Hartford in an article published in the September issue of Current History.

Chinese University of Hong Kong social scientist Bryce McIntyre says the government’s tactics boil down to a simple formula: “Block minds, not sites.”

“For the authorities, it’s more efficient just to scare the hell out of people,” he added. It is one of the ironies of China’s Internet development that U.S. high-tech companies are among those eager to supply China with the kind of technology that Beijing uses to spot Internet content deemed undesirable or subversive.

Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems were among the 34 American companies that registered to show products at an exhibition in Beijing in November organized in part by China’s Ministry of Public Security.

Companies from several other Western countries, including France, Britain, Germany and Israel, were also represented at the exhibition, called “Security 2000.”

George Feng, a systems engineer who focuses on Internet security at Cisco’s office in Beijing, said his company markets three types of anti-hacking software to the Chinese government. One of these systems, which blocks access to designated Internet sites, is produced by Websense Inc. of San Diego.

Websense spokesman Ted Ladd says the software is mainly used by corporations to block hackers and to keep employees from accessing pornography or other inappropriate Web sites at work. But he said the Chinese government has bought its product “with the possibility they are blocking news. . . . We have no control over the categories of Web sites customers choose to block. It’s up to them. We have 60-plus categories of content they could be screening.”

University of Massachusetts political scientist Hartford sees both the severe restrictions on Internet news content and the growth in Chinese-language content--whose sheer volume helps keep users away from politically lively but harder to deal with English-language sites--as part of a government strategy to create what she terms “a safe sandbox.” The goal is a politically harmless cyber-playground where the nation’s growing population of online users can surf free of dangerous ideas.

And few business executives are willing to risk either a current investment or their corporate future in one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing consumer electronics markets by allowing provocative content onto their sites.

On Sohu’s bulletin boards, for example, there’s something for just about everyone: games, stocks, pets, religion, you name it.

But each bulletin board has its host, in charge of maintaining a semblance of order--”deleting trash,” as one Sohu staff member put it, and posting items of interest. Web sites that host bulletin boards and chat rooms must be approved by the Ministry of Information Industry.

One visitor posted an essay by a liberal academic whose writings are banned in print. There’s an ultranationalist corner with praise for the Communists’ late rival Chiang Kai-shek. There’s even a copy of Al Gore’s concession speech, in Chinese and English.

The host of the human rights section goes by the tag line “A Chinese person unwilling to be a slave,” a twist on a line from China’s national anthem. A message tells users that there is respect for differences of opinion and a reluctance to delete postings, but then it draws a bottom line: “We’re using Sohu’s space and they have their rules, so they often interfere.”

In a separate building, Sohu’s teams of monitors scan the bulletin boards for unacceptable postings to be deleted.

“We go with our intuition,” one staff member said. “If something makes us uncomfortable, we nix it.”

A special team of monitors watches the news section of the boards.

“They get some guidance from the government on that,” the staff member said. “They get rid of fake news items, things without basis. They just place a check next to the posting and it’s gone.”

But in a process much like what Sohu CEO Zhang described, Western observers believe, the size of the safe sandbox will gradually grow and subjects for deletion will gradually diminish.

“China is about to join the world community, and it will be with the help of the Internet,” McIntyre said. “It will probably take a generation, but China will become a more civil, more democratic society. It’s [already] happening.”

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Times staff writer Marshall reported from Hong Kong and Beijing, and special correspondent Kuhn from Beijing. Staff writer Chris Kraul in Los Angeles contributed to this report.