Internet censorship in mainland China

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The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China has passed an Internet censorship law in mainland China. In accordance with this law, several regulations were made by the PRC government, and a censorship system is implemented variously by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. The project is known as Golden Shield. The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems, so this law does not apply there.

The firewall part of the system is known outside mainland China as the Great Firewall of China (in reference both to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China). The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways. The system also selectively engages in DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested. The government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical[1].

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Contents

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Extent

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Foreign sites

Research into the mainland Chinese Internet censorship has shown that blocked websites include:

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Technical sites

  • Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia, have recently been blocked for the third time. See Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China.
  • SourceForge: SourceForge was blocked in 2002. The site was unblocked in 2003, but as of January 2006, it has been blocked again, but only projects.sourceforge.net is banned, so one can open the sourceforge home page (although not css files stored at static.sourceforge.net used in the home page), but cannot open project pages at xxx.sourceforge.net.
  • FreeBSD.org: FreeBSD.org was banned since December 2005. The block was released. [3]
  • PHP.net: PHP.net was banned by China Telecom (southern China) according to some users. [4]
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Free Internet services

  • geocities
  • zoneedit (free DNS service, one of the servers blocked)
  • blogspot (however, blogger.com is not blocked)
  • dictionary.com (online dictionary thesaurus translator and other services)
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Search engines

See also: List of words blocked by search engines in Mainland China

One part of the block is to disallow certain terms from being used on search engines. These search engines include both international ones (e.g. Yahoo! and Google) as well as domestic ones (e.g. Baidu). Attempting to search for such a term results in a The page cannot be displayed error. Repeatedly attempting to search for blocked terms results in the entire search engine being blocked, presumably from the same IP address.

In general, if a term is blocked, then any sequence containing the term is also blocked. For example, since 法轮 (falun, or "Law wheel") is blocked, so are 法轮功 (Falun Gong) and 转法轮 ("Turning the Law wheel").

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Other methods

Although blocking foreign sites has received much attention in the West, this is actually only a part of the PRC effort to censor the Internet. Although the government rarely practices this, much more effective is the ability to censor content providers within mainland China, as the government can physically seize any website and its operators.

Although the government does not have the physical resources to monitor all Internet chat rooms and forums, the threat of being shut down has caused internet content providers to employ internal staff, colloquially known as "big mamas", who stop and remove forum comments which may be politically sensitive.

However, Internet content providers have adopted some counterstrategies. One is to go forth posting political sensitive stories and removing them only when the government complains. In the hours or days in which the story is available online, people read it, and by the time the story is taken down, the information is already public. One notable case in which this occurred was in response to a school explosion in 2001, when local officials tried to suppress the fact the explosion resulted from children illegally producing fireworks. By the time local officials forced the story to be removed from the Internet, the news had already been widely disseminated.

In addition, Internet content providers often replace censored forum comments with white space which allows the reader to know that comments critical of the authorities had been submitted, and often to guess what they must have been.

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Implementation

The banning appears to be mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc, with some sites being blocked and similar sites being allowed. The blocks are often lifted for special occasions. One example was the New York Times which was unblocked when reporters in a private interview with Jiang Zemin specifically asked about the block and he replied that he would look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai during 2001, normally-blocked media sources such as CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post suddenly became accessible. Since 2001, the content controls have been further relaxed on a permanent basis, and all three of the sites previously mentioned are now accessible from mainland China. In fact, most foreign news organisations' web sites are accessible, though a small number (including the BBC) continue to be blocked.

Mainland Chinese agencies frequently issue regulations about the Internet, but these are often not enforced or are ignored. One major problem in enforcement is determining who has jurisdiction over the Internet, causing many bureaucratic turf battles within the PRC government among various ministries and between central and local officials. The State Council Information Office has the mandate to regulate the Internet, but other security agencies in mainland China have a say as well.

Some legal scholars have pointed out that the frequency at which the PRC government issues new regulations on the Internet is a symptom of their ineffectiveness because the new regulations never make reference to the previous set of regulations, which appear to have been forgotten.

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Role of foreign companies

One controversial issue is whether foreign companies should supply equipment which assists in the blocking of sites to the PRC government. Some argue that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship, while others argue that equipment being supplied, from companies such as the American based Cisco Systems Inc., is standard Internet infrastructure equipment and that providing this sort of equipment actually aids the flow of information. Without the equipment, the PRC government would not develop the Internet at all.

However, human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders point out that if companies would stop contributing to the authorities' censorship efforts the government could be forced to change.

A similar dilemma faces foreign content providers such as Yahoo!, AOL and Google who abide by PRC government wishes, including having internal content monitors, in order to be able to operate within mainland China. Also, in accordance with mainland Chinese laws, Microsoft began to censor the content of its blog service MSN Spaces.

Sites that host software that can be used to circumvent the censorship, such as Freenet and Peek-a-Booty, are also banned. (For some time, this included the entire open source software repository at SourceForge, as it hosts the Freenet project, among thousands of others.)

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Corporate responsibility

Not everyone is comfortable with multinational enterprises colluding with Mainland authorities to censor the Internet.

On November 7 2005 an alliance of investors and researchers representing twenty-six companies in the U.S., Europe and Australia with over US $21 billion in joint assets announced that they were urging businesses to protect freedom of expression and pledged to monitor technology companies that do business in countries violating human rights, such as China. On December 21 2005 the UN, OSCE and OAS special mandates on freedom of expression called on internet corporations to "work together ... to resist official attempts to control or restrict use of the Internet."

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Recent developments

On July 11, 2003, the PRC government granted licenses to open Internet cafe chains. The licenses were awarded to 10 firms, including three affiliated to the PRC Ministry of Culture: China Audio-Visual Publishing House, which plans to set up 50,000 cafes in 40 cities in three years, the China Cultural Relics Information Center and the China National Library. A fourth operator, China Youth Net, is affiliated with the politically powerful Central Committee of China Youth League. The other six include state-owned telecoms operators such as China United Telecommunications Corporation, parent of China Unicom Ltd, Great Wall Broadband Network Service Co Ltd, or Internet service providers such as www.readchina.com, which belongs to Read Investment Holdings Co., a high-tech conglomerate founded in 1988 which has annual revenues of 10 billion yuan. Business analysts and foreign internet operators regard the licenses as intended to clamp down on information deemed harmful to the PRC government.

On October 18, 2005, the PRC government restarted its policy of blocking access to Wikipedia. It is currently hard to access Wikipedia directly, or the majority of articles concerning the censorship thereof, from within mainland China. [5]

On February 14, 2006, a group of former senior Communist party officials in China criticized the internet censorship, stating that strict censorship may "sow the seeds of disaster" for China's political transition [6]. On the next day, a government spokesman responded that its rules are "fully in line" with the rest of the world and that "no one had been arrested just for writing online content" [7].

In February 2006, Google made significant concession against this Great Firewall, in exchange for equipment installation on the soil of China, by blocking websites which the Chinese Government illegalized (See "Google Under the Gun," TIME, Feb 13, 2006). TIME reported that Google protests that it's in a tough situation but says it ultimately has to obey local laws.

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Liberalization of sexually oriented content

Although restrictions on political information remain as strong as ever, several sexually oriented blogs began appearing in early 2004. Women using the web aliases Muzi Mei (木子美) and Zhuying Qingtong (竹影青瞳) wrote online diaries of their sex lives and became minor celebrities. This was widely reported and criticized in mainland Chinese news media, but has not resulted in any real crackdown as of yet. This has coincided with an artistic nude photography fad (including a self-published book by dancer Tang Jiali) and the appearance of pictures of minimally clad women or even topless photos in a few mainland Chinese newspapers, magazines and websites. It is too soon to tell how far this trend will go, but increasingly, censorship is applicable to political content rather than to sexuality. Although this does not hold true for many dating and 'adult chat' sites, both Chinese and foreign, which have been blocked recently. Some, however, continue to be accessible although this appears to be due more to the Chinese government's ignorance of their existence than any particular policy of leniency.

In the summer of 2005, the PRC purchased over 200 routers from an American company, Cisco Systems that will allow the PRC government a more advanced technological censoring ability. [8]

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Efforts at breaking through

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The firewall is largely ineffective at preventing the flow of information and is rather easily circumvented by determined parties by using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and ssh connections to outside mainland China are not blocked, so circumventing all of the censorship and monitoring features of the Great Firewall of China is trivial for those who have these secure connection methods to computers outside mainland China available to them.

Neither the Tor website or network are blocked, making Tor (in conjunction with Privoxy) an easily acquired and effective tool for circumvention of the censorship controls. Tor maintains a public list of entry nodes, so the authorities could easily block it if they had the inclination. According to the Tor FAQ sections 6.4 and 7.9, Tor is vulnerable to timing analysis by Chinese authorities, so it allows a breach of anonymity. Thus for the moment, Tor allows uncensored downloads and uploads, although no guarantee can be made with regard to freedom from repercussions.

In addition to Tor, there are various HTTP/HTTPS Tunnel Services, which work in a similar way as Tor. At least one of them, Your Freedom, is confirmed to be working from China and also offers encryption features for the transmitted traffic.

It was common in the past to use Google's cache feature to view blocked websites. However, this feature of Google seems to be under some level of blocking, as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites. Currently the block is mostly circumvented by using proxy servers outside the firewall, and is not difficult to carry out for those determined to do so. Some well-known proxy servers have also been blocked.

Some Chinese citizens use the Google Mirror elgooG after China blocked Google. It is believed that elgooG survived the Great Firewall of China because the firewall operators thought that elgooG was not a fully functional version of Google.

As Falun Gong websites are generally inaccessible from mainland China, practitioners have launched a company named UltraReach Internet Corp and developed a piece of software named UltraSurf to enable people in mainland China to access restricted web sites via Internet Explorer without being detected.

Other techniques used include Freenet, a peer-to-peer distributed data store allowing members to anonymously send or retrieve information, and TriangleBoy.

Another common way of sneaking illegal information is the use of cellular phones and text messaging, though these are also monitored by the government.

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See also

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External links

th:เกรตไฟร์วอลล์ zh:中国网络审查

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