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Panel 5: China's Internet: What freedom/What limits? China's Suppression on Internet Expression The remarkable development of the Internet accesses and usages in China has certainly improved the quality of people's lives, including their freedom of expression at least technically. The independent writers, especially the cyber dissidents, who had little chance to get their critical opinions publicized on traditional media, can easily find various opportunities to publish their writings on or 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, especially the dissidents. On the other hand, China, the largest police state in the world, has never given away the police control and censorship of Internet expression, nor reduced their Internet suppression. In China, Internet Police, or Cybercops, is officially termed as the Special Police for Internet Security Inspection. In 1996, China's cybercops started being organized as a branch of police at the Public Security Bureau in several large cities where the Internet access was available. In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security established the Public Information Network Security Inspection Bureau, and since then, the same departments/divisions at different police ranks in whole China. Since 2002, the Internet police started being transferred into a more independent special task force like traffic police and criminal police by setting up the ranks of provincial contingent, city detachment and county brigade. China's Internet Police consist now of more than 50,000 cybercops, each responsible for 4000 Internet users at average. They have set up several hundreds of their websites or homepages at different ranks. On Jan 1, 2006, the police (Jing-Cha) in Shenzhen City, near Hong Kong, staged the Virtual Police by personalizing the carton images of cybercops, a policeman and a policewoman nicknamed as Jing-jing and Cha-cha, respectively. This nice pair of Virtual Police have not only got their respective homepages (http://66110.qzone.qq.com and http://777110.qzone.qq.com) but also are patrolling at the major websites and forums on Internet in that city to remind the users to behave themselves, censor the online expression and information and offer the informants the alarm services. By February 2008, the police in more than 150 cities have followed this practice with more than 50,000 popular websites patrolled by Virtual Police and stationed with the Virtual Police Boxes for the informant's services. China has been world's largest jailer of writers and journalists. Since 2004, the Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPC) has documented 83 cases of 79 individuals, excluding those in Tibet as well as those shortly detained for less than a month or released before 2004. Among them, 39 are still in jail, including 4 released once before, while 40 have been freed. 61 of 83 cases, nearly three fourth, were charged for Internet activities at least partly. Among 31 dissidents charged only for Internet expression, the first arrested was HANG Qi, director of 6-4 Tianwang website in Sichuan Province, on 3rd of June 2000 while the latest was HU Jia in Beijing last December. The first convicted was GUO Qinghuai in Heibei Province on 6th of April 2001 while the latest was HU Jia on April 3. The annual records of the arrests and convictions reached the maxima 14 in 2004 and 19 in 2003, respectively, and then they continuously decrease except for the convictions in 2006. This drop does not necessarily indicate a trend of less Internet suppression or more improvement of free expression, but a result from the Internet crackdown in 2003 and from more effective censorship and severer suppression on Internet in recent years. There had been no conviction only for Internet expression in China until after Dec 28, 2000, when its National People's Congress Standing Committee adopted the Resolution on Internet Safety. This resolution is a typical of abuse of law to suppress freedom of expression on Internet, such as, Article 2: In order to safeguard national security and social stability, any of the following actions, which constitutes a crime, will be investigated for criminal responsibility in accordance with the relevant provisions in Criminal Law: (1) utilizing the Internet for rumour mongering, defamation or publicizing or transmitting any other harmful information to incite subversion of the State power, repudiate the socialist system......; (2) stealing or divulging state secrets, intelligence or military matters through the Internet; ...... In 2000, before the Resolution was adopted, there had already been three arrests, including both Huang and Guo, only for Internet expression. In 2001 and 2002, all of three were sentenced to 5-10 years in jail on the infamous charge of "inciting subversion of the State power". Among 28 convictions only for their Internet expressions since then, 24 cyber dissidents, 86%, have been sentenced to 2-10 years in jail on this charge. There is an indication in a practical limit to Internet expression that minimal publications on Internet for a conviction on this charge has only 4 critical humors, such as one entitled Joining American Citizenship in Mind, by LI Yuanlong, a journalist in Guizhou Province, who thus served a sentence of 2 years in jail during 2005-2007. Each of rest 4 convictions was based on a different charge, respectively. o Ma Yalian served one year and half of the Education Trough Labor without trial during 2004-2005, on a charge of "disturbing social security order" for posting on Internet her personal accounts on the police persecution of her and other petitioners. o Li Changqing, the winner of WAN's 2008 Golden Pen of Freedom Award, just completed 2 months ago his 3-year sentence on a charge of "deliberately spreading false and terror information" only for his posting on an overseas Chinese website, Boxun News Network, one report on an outbreak of dengue fever in his home city of Fuzhou. o Shi Tao, a recipient of CPJ's 2005 Press Freedom Award and WAN's 2005 Golden Pen of Freedom Award, has been serving his 10-year sentence since 2004, on a charge of "illegally providing state secrets overseas" only for sending to an overseas Chinese website one email of his notes of a Communist Party's document on media guidelines. o Huang Jinqiu has been serving his 12-year sentence �^later reduced by 22 months) since 2003, on a charge of "subverting the state secrets" for publishing his critical articles and organizing a political party on Internet, so far the severest punishment for dissident activities on Internet. The governmental censorship and suppression on the Internet activities in China has been getting more effective and more severe with the development of information technology, especially with the increasing assistance from and cooperation with the world's leading IT giants such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco to enhance the governmental control of Internet in China. Sometimes the arrests and convictions of cyber dissidents have been based on the evidences provided by the Internet companies such as Yahoo, who have helped Chinese authorities to get in jail at least 4 dissident writers, WANG Xiaonin (10 years), LI Zhi (8 years), JIANG Lijun (4 years) and SHI Tao (10 years). A public security information management and surveillance network named as Golden Shield is a comprehensive national project developed by the Ministry of Public Security since 1998. It started in partial use in 2002 and completed with its whole applications in 2004. Its censorship system has implemented variously by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. Since then, the dissident options and even sensitive news can hardly escape the censorship to publicize on Internet within China. If appeared, such a message would be immediately deleted by a webmaster, otherwise the relevant forum or website would be closed and those responsible would be warned. Since 2006, no independent forum/website of political or social issues have been able to survive within China. On the other hand, the overseas information to China has been censored and filtered by its firewall system known as the Great Firewall of China. The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at China's limited Internet gateways. It also selectively engages in DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested. The most noticeable appearance of the cybercops in China is their controls of the Internet cafes where more than one third (34%) of its Internet users now carry out their main online activities. To avoid the cybercops to find the identity, many individuals in China used to getting and sending the information undesirable to the government at Internet caf� where no ID had been required. Since 2003, however, more and more local authorities ordered the Internet caf�s to demand all of their customers to register real ID for the online activities. In 2004, nearly half of China's 200,000 Internet caf�s were banded or closed by the police for various reasons while the rests had to install a surveillance software in their systems to track their users' online movements, keep records of the names, addresses and ID numbers, and more importantly, enable the police to perform the remote central monitoring and control of the Internet activities. In these ways, the cybercops have been more extensively organized and played a more active role in inspecting, monitoring, tracing and suppressing the dissident expressions on Internet. Therefore, more and more cyber dissidents can be identified by the cybercops at very early stage, even when the first critical online massage is posted, and so are often warned and harassed before their Internet expressions reach the extent for an arrest or conviction. Many cyber dissidents have been forced to take a measure of self-censorship to avoid the eventually severer punishment as warned by the police. As a result, the freedom of expression on Internet has been effectively suppressed even with a tendency of decreasing the annual arrests and convictions in China since 2003/2004. |
