Untitled - socium.ge

The Internet in China 113Usually one can access the Net at a cybercafé without showing an ID card; andit is common practice for people to use “Get Online Cards (shangwangka)”that provide dial-up connections without asking for any personal information.30 Although the censorship regime tries to block, filter, and track, mostdetermined users in China can access outlawed information via encryptedmessages, FTP, and, most recently, peer-to-peer technologies (Chase et al.,forthcoming).Moreover, China cannot extend its censorship overseas to disrupt humanrights networks in the US, Falun Gong websites in Europe, multilingual listservsabout Tibet and Taiwan, or Western “hacktivist” groups whose membersoppose Beijing’s Internet strategies. The globally networked nature of suchoppositional forces frustrates all national authorities trying to control theInternet. This is particularly so for the Chinese censors for they are unlikely towin public sympathy in liberal democracies where the anti-censorshipnetworks are usually concentrated.In sum, there are three discernible characteristics of China’s Internetcensorship system that deserve attention. First, regulatory measures are oftenpost-hoc reactions to unpredictable conditions. The surge of content regulationin 2000 was driven by the official perception of threats arising from the 1999anti-NATO demonstrations, in part organized by online forums, whichfollowed the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. It also resultedfrom the global dot-com fever that lured China’s traditional media monopolies,which hoped to raise the entry barrier to the ICP market.Second, although the censorship regime began as a hierarchy in the late1990s (Qiu, 1999: 14–15), its internal redundancy has been increasing alonglegislative, administrative, and technological dimensions since 2000. Thisgives rise to a network of censors which includes multiple state agencies andcommercial entities with relatively independent political and economicgoals. 31 There is no single central control point, as evidenced in the unblockingof nytimes.com following the newspaper’s interview with former presidentJiang Zemin, when he praised The New York Times without knowing that itswebsite was banned in China (Gittings, 2001; Wong, 2002b). The lack of atraditional censorship hierarchy was also shown in the blocking of Google inthe fall of 2002. This fiasco reportedly involved multiple censorship agenciesand China’s domestic search-engine companies, which hoped to increase theirmarket share by blocking Google.com (BBS News World Edition, 2002;Wong, 2002a). But the network of censors is not a flat assemblage of looselinks either. It is enabled by new technologies to carry on the missions of variousinstitutions: from the security/secrecy ministries to the CCP propagandadivisions at national and local levels, operating with compartmentalized interestsin a way that differs from a traditional media control bureaucracy.Finally, China’s network of censors has entered into a covert alliance with