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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
America's most popular Internet companies are helping China crack down on free speech.
Dec 16, 2005 | About once a month executives from China's Internet news sites gather in a small meeting room on the first floor of Beijing's Information Office, where a government official tells them what not to report. China's Internet giants all send representatives, as does the China branch of one of America's best-known icons: Yahoo. The visitors take notes and ask few questions.
On especially sensitive days, the speaker is the office's director, Wang Hui, a woman whom an attendee of the meetings describes as pleasant and informal, with her hair cut short in the classic style of a Chinese bureaucrat. "Her demeanor is friendly," says the attendee, who requested anonymity because describing the meetings could lead to arrest. "We have known each other for a long time, and our companies are very cooperative."
The meetings are part of a system of Internet censorship that combines technological filters, human monitors and threats of detention to systematically suppress political speech. With more than 100 million regular Internet users, China is second only to the United States in terms of potential customers. But the Chinese government holds Web sites responsible for the content they and their users provide. Although much of the censorship gets carried out by the state, the authorities also rely heavily on the private sector.
To conduct business in China, popular Internet companies Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have had to accommodate a regime that forbids free speech, bars political parties and jails journalists. This means filtering searches on their sites, censoring news and providing evidence in the trials of political dissidents -- or risk having their sites blocked in China. Forced to choose between ignoring the world's hottest market or implicitly endorsing a system of censorship that a recent Harvard study called "the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," the companies have decided to cooperate.
"Business is business," Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com, which controls Yahoo China, told the Financial Times. "It's not politics."
But these corporations are not simply doing business in China, they are patching the only chink in the censors' armor: China's international reputation. The country that will host the 2008 Olympics cares about its image. The 1980s boycott of South Africa hurt the apartheid regime as much by denying it respectability as by punishing its economy.
In China, the private sector -- specifically foreign companies -- plays the opposite role. There's a difference between assembling cars or manufacturing microchips in a repressive state and participating in repression. The first can be excused as engagement. The second endorses the practice. By cooperating with the censors, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo blunt free-speech activists' only remaining weapon.
The Chinese government's "Great Firewall" blocks access to whole domains such as Human Rights Watch, the Taiwanese government's home page, and BBC's news site. Algorithms also screen for keywords. Sites that repeatedly mention the spiritual movement Falun Gong, for instance, are blocked. The Harvard study found that 90 of the top 100 Chinese-language Google results for "Tiananmen Massacre" and 93 of the top 100 for "Chinese Labor Party" were inaccessible from within China. In other countries, a censored site is usually labeled as such. In China, the pages simply fail to load. Too many keyword hits and the user's access shuts down completely.
The technically savvy can always find ways around the filters. Proxy servers slip through China's gateways and posters use homonyms or slide extra characters into sensitive words. But the government accepts the leakage as long as it can squelch the loudest voices.
That approach can be seen in a 2004 sentencing law cracking down on Internet pornography, which is illegal in China. The law judges the seriousness of the offense not on a site's content but on its popularity. A Web master receiving more than 250,000 visitors might face life imprisonment. "The way to think about it is that they want to cap people's influence," says Jeremy Goldkorn, whose blog Danwei reported on the law.
China keeps its laws against political expression a secret. But those making too big a splash on the Web can expect a threatening phone call or have their site shut down. Persistence leads to the loss of a job or to arrest. According to Reporters Without Borders, China has at least 62 Internet dissidents behind bars, more than any other country. Intimidation stops what the filters miss.
