Monday, May 19, 2003		Feature

Net dodges Chinese censorship
Batuk Vora

IF there is one thing the Chinese enjoy the most in the midst of the media censorship, it is the Internet. The Internet is revolutionising the way Chinese communicate and interact. In some respects, the Internet users have crossed those boundaries of censorship. The government and business leaders recognise the medium as a key tool for economic reform, and encourage e-commerce and information technology investment. Intellectuals, dissidents, non-governmental groups — and the Chinese government itself — have all embraced the Internet to spread information, ideas and opinions. Even the Chinese Press is finding the Internet an important tool for circumventing otherwise tight controls.

Today, besides more than 2,000 daily newspapers and 900 TV stations catering to more than 90 million cable TV users, there are more than 3,00,000 Websites. These include news sites, professional information sites, corporation sites, institutional sites and personal home pages. The Internet in China is undergoing phenomenal growth. According to the latest survey, more than 45 million Chinese Internet users, logging on to more than 10 million computers, spend at least one hour a day to browse the Internet. Nearly 64 per cent of them regularly read the world news on overseas sites. Nearly 40 per cent of the young users browse overseas sites. According to the same report, there are now more than 1,22,099 domain names registered under ".cn" and 2,65,405 Websites in China.

The Chinese authorities are in a dilemma. They know China needs the economic benefits the Internet brings but fear the political fall-out from the free flow of information.

The Internet use is expanding faster than many anticipated. Many log on from their home computers, while others do so at work or at Net cafes. A large Net cafe, the Feiyu Net Cafe, near Beijing University’s South Gate, has 1,000 computers.

Electronic Chinese-language publications such as VIP Reference, Huaxia Wenzhai and the VOA’s emailed news reach many Chinese readers.

While the Internet can be a powerful tool for party propaganda, it has also become a powerful tool for disseminating less ideologically tinged material. More and more Chinese government agencies are posting useful and timely information online. Some Chinese judges have started publishing the reasoning behind their legal opinions on the Net, and some IPR enforcement agencies post the latest results of their anti-counterfeit raids, www.cqi.gov.cn

Chinese leaders reacted too late to the Industrial Revolution. They certainly don’t want China to miss on the information revolution. The policy quickly gained strong support because both conservatives and reformers agreed that this ‘class-neutral technology’ was needed to close the gap with China’s Asian neighbours and the Western world.

The Internet is also seen as an important instrument for propaganda. The Internet Propaganda Administrative Bureau, responsible amongst others for guiding and coordinating with the Chinese content Websites, was formed in April 2000. The strategy is to produce its own content (e.g. Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily) and limit other news sources.People’s Daily published new Internet regulations from the state secrecy bureau. The Chinese government has cracked down on Internet use that it considers dangerous, arresting several individuals, shutting down sites, and passing tough new laws that codify existing practice.

In the past, the party propaganda department and the security apparatus easily controlled and even tried to focus the readers’ mind on the party’s line of thinking. The picture is fast changing even before the party adopted political reform measures. Information technology’s fast spread has changed this picture. How does this new phenomenon affect the official media policy or a traditional media concept here? Party or government propaganda machinery hardly knew that such a fast change in media world would happen here. The country has only one wired service Xinhua, and they post a vast variety of stories. But thousands of news sites on the Web now function like mini-Xinhuas!

The government has tried to regulate and even control such discussions in these chat rooms through filtering and other means. But the censors are unable to keep pace with the fast rise of the Internet. Such chatroom ideas and thinking are not available in any state run media. Chatrooms have changed the basic movement of news in China and the authorities are losing the battle to control information and free expression on the Internet. — (IPA Service)