The Chinese state blocks information about ‘sensitive’ or ‘harmful’ topics including Tibet, the Tiananmen square massacre, Falun Gong, human rights and democracy. The reason why is quite simple; the Chinese state wants to shield itself from things which it sees as a threat to its rule. That’s why China is known to employ at least 30,000 people to track internet traffic, and probably employs significantly more. It’s also why the Chinese state is often accused of being behind high profile hacking on an international scale, including the hacking of foreign government, police and charity websites, email accounts and social media spaces.
The volume of people using the net in Chinese ruled territories shows why; China is an increasingly wired society, with some 50 million web users and 5 million bloggers, growing at a dizzying rate. What if all those people see things the state doesn’t want them to see?
News article about censorship in China and occupied countries
Online dissent
Aside from hacking and blocking, the Chinese state also imposes harsh sentences on those who use the internet to discuss political views or share photos, video or eyewitness accounts of brutality by the Chinese regime. China has become adept at hiding abuses from te outside world; it’s one of the main reasons why what’s happening in Tibet rarely makes TV news bullitens; smuggling the footage and pictures needed to make a news report worthwhile is notoriously dangerous and difficult.
Wangdu: life sentence for sending email to friends outside Tibet
Dhondup Wangchen: imprisoned for making ‘Leaving Fear Behind’, smuggled out & shared online
Tashi Rabten: Writer and blogger serving 4 years
The internet was one of the primary focuses of Charter 08; a document signed by Chinese activists, lawyers and intellectuals late that year, and which had its own website launched and shut down. Activist Liu Xiaobo, who organised the charter, said “we will definitely open again. If it can’t be in China, then we will open our website overseas.” Liu Xiaobo and others connected with the charter, which also called for greater freedoms and human rights in Tibet, were arrested, with Liu Xiaobo receiving an 11 year sentence. He was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights work, but remains incarcerated by the Chinese regime. Other important Chinese rights activists like the artists Ai Weiwei have used the internet to criticise the state and have also been subject to close monitoring, imprisonment and torture.
Jamyang Kyi: detained & tortured for blogging about Tibet
Norzin Wangmo: Serving 5 years for discussing Tibet on phone & email
Woeser: Often under house arrest for her blog Invisible Tibet
But netizens are finding new and ingenius ways to counter state controls. This can be done using proxy servers, systems like Tor and by using internet memes and codewords to mask what they’re really saying online. A good example of this is the ‘grass-mud horse’; a play on the Chinese phrase ‘f*ck your mother’, meaning the ‘motherland’ or the Chinese state. A whole online cult has grown around this fake creature, allowing netizens to criticise the state using language which can easily be mistaken for something innocent. This approach also adds an element of fun to criticising the regime, and can also be seen in online campaigns by exiles like Smurfyleakz and the Shapale song.
The Shapale Song and grass-mud horse videos went viral on social media outlets
Hacking
China covers its tracks well online, afterall it houses the world’s best hackers. But suspicions about the state’s involvement in hacking have been rife for many years, and teams across the world work to smash these hacking rings. In March 2009, ‘GhostNet’; an international hacking network, was exposed and accusations were made that it is linked to the Chinese state. Evidence was presented that the network had attacked computers in the Dalai Lama’s offices, installing malware which was intercepting incoming mail, turning webcams on and off, stealing sensitive information about contacts and turning on speakers to record whole conversations made in the offices and relay them to the hackers. Though the case against the Chinese state could not be proven, some instances were difficult to explain, such as one case where the Dalai Lama’s office had sent a private invite to a diplomat to meet his representatives but the Chinese state had contacted the diplomate persuading her not to go, despite nobody else having shared the correspondance. GhostNet was shown to have attacked the computers of governments, political groups and individuals in over 100 countries over a period of two years, but was suddently shut down when the New York Times carried the story and suggested links to the CCP.
The Chinese state is thought to operate similar networks all over the world, and is also known to hack websites of Tibet groups and individual activists. During times of crisis in Tibet, activists will be inundated with emails containing virus-ridden attachments from unknown sources, while their websites can be hacked and either shut down to prevent them sharing information with supporters or have viruses installed on them to infect supporter’s computers. Such activity has been traced back to China on numerous occasions, and though connections are difficult to prove, the overiding consensus among governments and rights groups is that the Chinese state employs vast networks to undertake hacking activities.
Information access
In September 2005, new restrictions were introduced which were designed to limit any distribution of information on websites relating to these and other ‘sensitive’ topics. And in June 2009, further restrictions were announced with the introduction of software called ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’ which was intended to prevent users from accessing ‘harmful’ content and which the Chinese state planned to implement into laws to force makers of PCs to install the software on all new machines. Worryingly, it seems that this law would also have included PCs made in China for export.
On hearing about plans to demand PC manufacturers pre-install censorship software, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke stated that “China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues” while US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said “mandating technically flawed Green Dam software and denying manufacturers and consumers freedom to select filtering software is an unnecessary and unjustified means to achieve that objective, and poses a serious barrier to trade.”
Chinese officials using the internet and the Green Dam girl
The Green Dam case is an interesting one because the leaked information led to Chinese netizens announcing they would boycott the internet for a day, costing the Chinese state (which effectively runs all such services in territories under its control) millions. The state eventually backed down in August 2009 and shelved the project, with a back-tracking Chinese Industry and Information Technology Minister Li Yizhong calling the notion that netizens were required to install te software ‘a misunderstanding’ and that the state “respected the choice of individuals who do not install it” while taking the time to hit out at rights groups, saying “those who overstated and politicised the issue, or even attacked China’s internet regulation, are irresponsible.” The campaign to oppose Green Dam was led by Chinese journalist Wen Yuchao, and shows that when it comes to the net, people power is effective, even in China.
Google has also been at the forefront of the debate over freedom of information. SFT and other Tibet groups had campaigned against Google’s decision to agree to Chinese state controls which required the search giant to filter out web searches for ‘sensitive’ topics like Tibet and the Tiananmen square massacre, but in January 2010, Google turned the tables on the Chinese state by threatening to end its operations in China unless the filtering was relaxed. The row had begun when Google discovered that Gmail accounts used by Chinese human rights activists were being hacked, probably by the state, in order to monitor and imprison them. Google’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development David Drummond said “these attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web… have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”
Cartoons about web access in China
The Chinese state refused to back down on the filtering issue, and Google responded by switching its google.cn service to it’s Hong Kong search engine, meaning that search results and images of Tibet, human rights groups and the massacre at Tiananmen Square were suddently available to web users across Chinese-ruled territory (though the websites themselves were still blocked by the Chinese Firewall). At the same time, Baidu- the Chinese counterpart to Google, was hacked and the entire firewall crashed for a few hours, allowing users full access in some areas. David Drummond said “we were always uncomfortable with China having censored our search results. We thought by being there we could be a force of openness. In fact, that has not happened. Things have gotten tighter… We discovered that activists had been under surveillance. And this just became something that we were not willing to do any more.”
A Yahoo spokeswoman said that Yahoo was ‘aligned’ to Google when the hacks became known, and that Yahoo regarded the attacks as ‘deeply disturbing’ and a violation of the privacy of web users; “Yahoo condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose. We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach” while web security company Mcafee said (this is) “a watershed moment in cyber security” and that “the complexity of the hacks suggest that a large organisation or nation state was responsible.” Meanwhile domain registration company Go Daddy stopped resistering domain names in China, saying “we made a decision we didn’t want to act as an agent for the Chinese government.”
What Chinese netizens saw when searching for ‘Tiananmen’ during Google’s switch
Though Google later reverted to state filtering demands when China threatened it would remove Google’s licence to operate in China if it refused, this case shows that international companies have some power over China, and that the firewall can be broken and information revealed to the general public. As information tends to spread quickly, it’s unknown how many Chinese netizens would have changed their views about the state after seeing what is being hidden from them for a short time.
The United States has been especially outspoken about information access in China and Tibet, and regularly berates the regime’s approach in its annual human rights reports. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Google’s allegations against China “raise very serious concerns and questions… we look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.” It is said that the US government spends millions of dollars every year on research and software designed to break the Chinese firewall and bring free information access to China and occupied territories.
Hilary Clinton on the announcement of Gmail hacking
In 2010, the Chinese state brought in a new law requiring anybody who wishes to set up a website domain to register and meet with officials before gaining permission. This screening process allows the state to prevent those with interests in ‘harmful’ topics from launching websites and removes the anonimity with which people are able to communicate on the web in other countries.
China continues to block popular sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, especially when disturbing evidence of state brutality emerges. In 2009, Twitter was shut down in China after Uyghurs used the micro-blogging service to share information about the crackdowns taking place in East Turkestan, and when a video of police brutality against Tibetans emerged on YouTube the same year, it was also blocked. YouTube is incredibly popular with Chinese netizens, and pro-Tibet videos are often swamped with ranting comments quoting propaganda terms such as ‘serfdom’ and ‘splittism’ and criticisim of the ‘western media’. But even these Chinese commentators must get suspicious when their access to YouTube disappears for months at a time. YouTube is a self-generated media outlet allows them to make comments, but the state which they defend does not.
The Dalai Lama gave his own commentary on the issue, saying “censorship … is the source of the problem… The Chinese people have no opportunity to know our issue. Once China becomes an open society; freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of information; all this unnecessary fear and doubt will reduce.”
These are all examples of how the Chinese state seeks to prevent people discussing issues which could threaten it’s control, and that’s exactly why we should be doing it more! It’s dangerous for Tibetans inside Tibet to speak openly about their political views online, but more and more of them are doing that, at great risk to themselves and their families. When they take this risk, it’s important that we make their voices heard and ensure that their efforts are not in vain. And if we can develop technologies and inform Tibetans about how to protect themselves online, we can help this online movement of freedom and resistance to challenge the Chinese state.
