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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 70 supermarket chain] Carrefour, for example started on the Internet. And Carrefour is terrified of this. So we have to see that China has become much more proactive. They are much less frightened of the news coming into their country, and they are prepared to fight it out on our web sites. I think this is something that is developing even as we speak. On our web site, there were so many comments from China giving the Chinese viewpoint that one got the impression that they had won the argument. There were all sorts of people saying that the Dalai Lama was an impostor. They had much more detailed information on Tibet than our French readers. I think this is going to be a challenge over the next few years. It is an export program of China's views and ideology in a new proactive mode, with the Internet as its vehicle. This, in my opinion, is much more worrisome than censorship. Maintaining political correctness at the Internet cafes Yu Zhang Coordinator, Independent Chinese PEN Center China joined the global Internet in 1994. Internet access became commercially available in 1995. In 1996, China had fewer than 100,000 Internet users and 1,000 web sites. Eleven years later, by the end of 2007, this had increased to 210 million users and 1.5 million web sites. This remarkable development has certainly improved the quality of people's lives, including their freedom of expression, at least technically. Independent writers, especially cyber-dissidents, who had little chance to get their critical opinions publicized on traditional media, can more easily find opportunities to publish through the Internet while generally facing less troubles than their predecessors who had fought for their free expression for years. In today's China, Internet expression has become extensively popular and extremely important to the intellectuals, particularly the dissidents. On the other hand, China has never abandoned police control and censorship of Internet expression. In 1996, branches of the newly formed Special Police for Internet Security Inspection were established in several large cities where Internet access was available. In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security established a Public Information Network Security Inspection Bureau, which covers the entire country. The Internet police include more than 50,000 officers, each responsible for 4,000 Internet users on average. They have set up several hundred web sites or home pages. In more than 150 cities, they patrol web sites and forums to remind users to behave themselves and censor on-line expression and information.
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 71 China has been world's largest jailer of writers and journalists. Since 2004, the Independent Chinese PEN Center has documented about 80 cases, excluding those in Tibet, and those detained for less than a month or released before 2004. 39 are still in jail. There were no convictions for Internet expression in China before Dec 28, 2000, when the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Standing Committee adopted the Resolution on Internet Safety, which establishes as a crime: • Using the Internet for rumor-mongering, defamation or publicizing or transmitting any other harmful information to incite subversion of the State power, repudiate the socialist system... • Stealing or divulging state secrets, intelligence or military matters through the Internet. Since then, 28 persons have been jailed for periods of up to 10 years for subverting state power over the Internet, including Li Yuanlong, a journalist who was sentenced to two years in prison in 2005 for writing an essay entitled “Joining American citizenship in mind.” Ma Yalian served 18 months of “education through labor” for posting her personal account of how police had harassed her and other dissidents. Li Changqing, the winner of the World Association of Newspaper's Golden Pen of Freedom award, recently completed a three-year sentence for “spreading false and terror information” by reporting on an outbreak of dengue fever for the Boxun news site. Shi Tao, a recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2005 Press Freedom award and WAN's 2005 Golden Pen of Freedom award, has been serving a 10-year sentence since 2004 for “illegally providing state secrets overseas” for e-mailing notes about a Communist Party document on media guidelines. Huang Jinqiu was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced by 22 months) in 2003 for publishing critical articles and organizing a political party on the Internet. Government censorship and suppression on Internet activities in China has been getting more effective and severe with the development of information technology, especially with increasing assistance and cooperation from the world's leading IT giants such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The arrest and conviction of some dissidents have been based on evidence provided by Internet companies such as Yahoo, which provided information that resulted in the conviction of at least four dissident writers - Wang Xiaonin (10 years), Li Zhi (8 years), Jiang Lijun (4 years) and Shi Tao (10 years). A security information management and surveillance network called Golden Shield is a comprehensive national project developed by the Public Security Ministry since 1998. It makes it hard to publish dissident opinions and sensitive news in China. Web masters quickly delete suspect items, or risk the close of web sites or forums
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