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By Mihray Abdilim | Radio Free Asia | July 28, 2010    

HONG KONG—Three webmasters, all members of the Uyghur ethnic minority, have been sentenced to jail for publishing content deemed politically sensitive by the Chinese government, according to a brother of one of the men.

The defendants are Dilshat Perhat, webmaster and owner of Diyarim; Nureli, webmaster of Salkin; and Nijat Azat, webmaster of Shabnam. They were sentenced last week in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwestern China.

Dilmurat Perhat said his brother Dilshat Perhat received five years in prison, while Nureli and Nijat Azat received three years and 10 years, respectively, for “endangering state security.”

No official comment or confirmation was immediately available.

The verdicts were handed down in a series of closed trials at the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court, Dilmurat Perhat said. All three websites publish online in the Uyghur language, spoken by the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority.

Dilmurat Perhat, another webmaster for Diyarim who currently lives in England, had recently refused to speak with the media about his brother for fear of creating a more difficult situation for him in custody.

In April, after Beijing appointed Zhang Chunxian the new secretary of the Xinjiang regional committee, the family was visited by Chinese authorities who warned them to “make him shut up or his brother would be lost” in jail.

But after learning of his brother’s sentence and after their father’s recent death in the wake of Dilshat Perhat’s arrest in August last year, he agreed to a telephone interview.

“I have already lost my father and my brother, so now I will speak with the media,” Dilmurat Perhat said.

“To the media I would like to speak for freedom and justice for all Uyghur webmasters. I want the world media and other human rights organizations to call on the Chinese government to free all Uyghur webmasters and journalists.”

A friend of the family, who asked not to be named, said Dilshat Perhat’s mother was unable to attend her son’s trial because she was distraught over her husband’s recent death.

She refused to speak with the media because she remains concerned over her son’s treatment in jail.

Webmasters targeted

The verdicts follow the sentencing last week of another prominent, moderate Uyghur journalist and webmaster for talking to foreign media about July 2009 ethnic riots in Xinjiang which left nearly 200 people dead, according to official estimates.

Gheyret Niyaz was sentenced on July 23 by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court to 15 years in prison on charges of “endangering state security” and was given 15 days to appeal.

Niyaz, 51 and a former deputy director of the official Xinjiang Legal Daily, was employed at the official Xinjiang Economic Daily as a journalist at the time of his detention on Oct. 4, 2009.

His family received a warrant for his arrest four days later, relatives have said. Niyaz also served as webmaster and administrator of the Uyghur Online website, run by outspoken Uyghur economics professor Ilham Tohti.

In its 2009 annual report, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) noted that Uyghur Online and its staff had been uniquely targeted after the 2009 violence.

“In spring 2009, authorities shut down the website Uyghur Online, a multi-language news and discussion forum that addressed issues of ethnicity in China, and interrogated Beijing-based scholar Ilham Tohti, who runs the site,” the report said.

“Authorities later detained Ilham Tohti in July after XUAR government chairperson Nur Bekri alleged that Ilham Tohti’s website contributed to incitement of rioting in Urumqi on July 5. Authorities released Ilham Tohti from detention on Aug. 2. The whereabouts of some other Uyghur Online staff members are reportedly unknown.”

Following the region’s July 5, 2009 unrest, Nur Bekri took a firm stance against Uyghur webmasters’ publishing of information related to the incident.

“These websites publish so much bad news about what happened at the Shaoguan Toy Factory between Uyghur and Chinese workers,” he said, referring to a brawl in southern China that left two Uyghurs dead and touched off Uyghur protests in Urumqi.

“They say Uyghur workers died and carry similar kinds of news and this led to the July 5 event in Urumqi.”

Not long after Nur Bekri’s statement, Chinese police began arresting several Uyghur webmasters in Urumqi and other cities in the XUAR.

Simmering tensions

Millions of Uyghurs—a distinct, Turkic minority who are predominantly Muslim—populate Central Asia and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of northwestern China.

Ethnic tensions between Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese settlers have simmered for years, and erupted in July 2009 in rioting that left some 200 people dead, according to the Chinese government’s tally.

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China’s ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Chinese authorities blame Uyghur separatists for a series of deadly attacks in recent years and accuse one group in particular of maintaining links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

Flickr Creative Commons | Scott Chang

By Polly Hui | AFP | July 23, 2010

HONG KONG — China’s most popular blogger recalls being baffled when a publisher told him he could not run an article because it mentioned a person ordering a dish of lamb.

“I did not get it. What’s wrong with eating lamb?” Han Han says.

The publisher explained that by ordering lamb, the diner could be someone who did not eat pork.

And that could imply he was a Muslim — a particularly sensitive subject in China following deadly ethnic unrest in Xinjiang last year that pitted mostly Muslim Uighurs against the nation’s dominant Han group.

The 27-year-old high school drop-out and champion amateur race-car driver said he was frustrated that self-censorship by mainland publishers was often more stringent than the authorities themselves.

“I wish there was a law saying clearly what can be done and what can’t be. I wish we could lay all the issues on the table and discuss frankly about them.”

Han, famous for his witty, scathing critiques of China’s corrupt officials and social issues, has achieved phenomenal fame in the country’s tightly monitored cyberspace.

He has accumulated more than 300 million hits on his blog, making it the most popular in China — and probably the world.

A top-earning author with a dozen titles under his belt, Han was named by TIME magazine as among the world’s 100 most influential people, grouping him alongside US President Barack Obama and pop star Lady Gaga.

He said he had also recently rejected an invitation to promote a commercial product on his blog with the reward of 10,000 yuan (1,500 US dollars) for each word he writes — with no word limit.

“Some people are beneficiaries of a flawed judicial system. Some are beneficiaries of a chaotic society. I just happen to have benefited from telling the truth,” he recently told reporters at the Hong Kong Book Fair.

Han conceded that technological advances have played a vital role in his success.

“In the Internet era, once an article is posted online, there is nothing one can do to deny its existence,” Han said, referring to the fact that his readers always managed to copy contentious articles from his blog to their own sites — before they were taken down by China’s Internet police.

Before the launch of his popular literature-themed magazine “Party” this month, Han said he spent time and money consulting different publishers in the futile hope of preserving the articles in their original form.

“It is about making compromise all the time,” he said. “I still had to follow the rules because I wanted the magazine to be a legal publication.”

All 500,000 copies of the bi-monthly’s first issue, which included articles by other writers, sold out just four days after its release, government newspaper China Daily reported, smashing sales records.

For many, Han is the unofficial voice for China’s “Post 80s”, a generation born into the country’s economic boom who are typically regarded as spoilt as the single child in the family, apolitical, rebellious and status-obsessed.

Han shot to fame in 2000 after he published “The Triple Gate”, a novel based on his own experience as a school drop-out in Shanghai that mocked China’s rigid education system.

He has criticised China’s “underground Internet commentators” — hired by the government to skew public opinion by posting comments online favourable to the authorities.

The blogger also likes to ridicule officials’ conservative and outmoded approach to handling crises.

“Sometimes, the incident itself was not a big deal. But it was blown up by the government officials themselves,” he said.

After a man stabbed 32 people — mostly small children — at a kindergarten in eastern China in April, he wrote: “By controlling the media, prohibiting hospital visits, diverting attention, the (local) government managed to re-direct people’s anger towards the killer to the government itself.”

Despite his bravado, some critics have pointed out that Han has always been careful not to challenge the one-party rule of the Communist Party.

Han himself admits that he abides by the rigid — if unwritten — rules to ensure that his voice continues to be heard.

Asked about his views on the crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, he changed subject.

“I fell in love with this girl in the mainland a few days ago,” he said.

“She’s worried that if I said anything anti-government, I won’t be allowed back to China.”

The case of well-known Tibetan environmentalist, businessman and philanthropist Karma Samdrup, sentenced to 15 years in prison on June 24, 2010, by a court in Xinjiang, has been highly unusual in that those monitoring the case were able to see events unfolding almost in real time, thanks to the blog and Twitter output of Karma Samdrup’s wife, Dolkar Tso, and Karma Samdrup’s lawyer, the reknowned Chinese civil rights lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang. 

The trial of Karma Samdrup that started on June 22 ended with his heavy sentencing on June 24 on charges of “grave-robbing”, charges that had actually been dropped 12 years earlier by the authorities. Throughout those few days of the trial, Pu Zhiqiang was using Twitter to document the case as it unfolded. The verdict of 15 years was made known to Pu Zhiqiang’s followers, over 10.000 of them, just hours after it was announced. Below is a screenshot of Pu Zhiqiang’s Tweet announcing the verdict: 

At the same time, Karma Samdrup’s wife, Dolkar Tso, also present in the courtroom in Xinjiang for the duration of the trial, was also documenting events and writing about her thoughts and feelings on her blog, hosted on the popular Chinese blog portal Sohu.com. Below is a screenshot of one of Dolkar Tso’s early blogs: 

Screenshot of Dolkar Tso's blog on Sohu.com

Dolkar Tso persistently continued to use Sohu as her blog-hosting site despite her blog being closed down several times. Dolkar Tso’s blogging activities were monitored and reported by Tibetan writer, poet and blogger Woeser on her blog. Woeser was often quick to re-post articles from both Dolkar Tso and Pu Zhiqiang’s blogs before the posts were removed. 

According to Woeser’s blogposts, Dolkar Tso opened several blogs one after the other starting on June 2 with http://drolkartso.blog.sohu.com, the day when it was suddenly announced that the date of Karma Samdrup’s trial was to be postponed. This blog was shut down after just one day. 

The second blog, http://drolkar.blog.sohu.com/ was started on June 21 but was closed down after 5 days, shortly after Karma Samdrup’s sentence was announced. The post that Dolkar Tso wrote on her second blog, expressing her worries for her husband titled “Praying” was translated into English by High Peaks Pure Earth and subsequently quoted in an article in TIME magazine: 

“The account we heard … exceeded our worst imaginations,” his wife Dolkar Tso wrote in a blog post that was translated by High Peaks Pure Earth, a website that monitors Tibetan source material. “We heard about hundreds of different cruel torture methods, maltreatment around the clock, hitherto unheard of torture instruments and drugs, hard and soft tactics, and even of fellow prisoners being grouped together to extract a confession.” 

The third blog http://drolkar3.blog.sohu.com/, started on June 27 was closed down after 6 days on July 3. 

The fourth blog http://drolkar4.blog.sohu.com/ was started on July 3, the day that Karma Samdrup’s brother, environmentalist Rinchen Samdrup, was sentenced to 5 years in prison in a separate case taking place in Chamdo, Tibet. The blog was closed down after 3 days. 

The fifth blog http://drolkar5.blog.sohu.com/ was started on July 6 and appears to still be online at the time of writing, below is a screenshot of the blog: 

Screenshot of Dolkar Tso's Fifth Blog

Underneath her photograph on her blog is this passage: 

“Regardless of nationality, regardless of geography, seek only mercy and justice. No lies, no flattery, only perseverance and calm. What good comes of deleting this post or this blog?” 

Dolkar Tso (1) and Pu Zhiqiang (centre) in Xinjiang

Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang’s personal blog survived the duration of the trial and crucially he was even able to photograph and upload all 10 pages of Karma Samdrup’s sentencing documents on the evening of the sentencing. The documents were re-posted almost immediately on Woeser’s blog. 

However, on July 15, the blog was closed down, below is the error message that appears when trying to access http://puzhiqianglawyer.blog.sohu.com/ 

Since then, Pu Zhiqiang has been blogging on a new blog but still hosted on Sohu: http://lawyerpuzhiqiang.blog.sohu.com/ As he notes in the top bar of the blog, it is his 13th blog. A few days ago, ChinaGeeks reported that lawyer and blogger Liu Xiaoyuan had his Sohu blog closed down on July 12, 2010. 

Whilst an unprecedented amount of information was reaching the internet and the wider world throughout this case, what is also demonstrated here is the sheer persistence and determination required by civil society activists in the PRC to be heard using social media, as well as the importance of online networks of support to re-post articles and to spread the word on shuttered blogs that may have moved or reincarnated elsewhere.

Flickr Creative Commons | Clemson

By John Garnaut | Sydney Morning Herald | July 14, 2010

BEIJING: The Chinese Communist Party has detailed its ambitious but secretive strategy for transforming the internet into a force for keeping it in power and projecting ‘’soft power” abroad.

An internal speech by China’s top internet official, apparently posted by accident on an official internet site before being promptly removed, outlines a vast array of institutions and methods to control opinion at home and also ”create an international public opinion environment that is objective, beneficial and friendly to us”.

”Those efforts provided powerful public opinion support for unifying thinking, consolidating strength, assisting in our diplomatic battles and safeguarding our national interests,” said Wang Chen, who is deputy director of the Propaganda Department, head of External (foreign) Propaganda and also director of the State Council’s Information Office.

Mr Wang’s speech was made to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on April 29 and posted on the Congress’s website on May 4, before being removed, sanitised and re-posted on a more mainstream government website the following day. It was picked up by Human Rights in China and included in its report released yesterday, China’s Internet: Staking Digital Ground.

”China has this goal of establishing a Chinese intranet, removing China from the global internet, and you can see that in this report,” said Anne-Marie Brady, an expert on China’s propaganda system at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. ”The average Chinese person knows basically how the propaganda system works but there’s no need to advertise so blatantly what the government is doing,” she said, explaining why large sections of the original speech were deleted.

Rather than shut off China to the outside world, the Communist Party has maintained its authoritarian rule in the information age by vastly expanding its propaganda apparatus and modernising its methods and messages. The country’s 400 million internet users are ”guided” towards government-friendly information and away from ”harmful” content but can nevertheless access and spread information far more easily than previous generations.

Mr Wang said the internet ”has increased the government’s capabilities in social management” but also brought new subversive threats. ”As long as our country’s internet is linked to the global internet, there will be channels and means for all sorts of harmful foreign information to appear on our domestic internet,” Mr Wang said. He outlined how the party has used internet platforms to ”markedly strengthen” its capability to promote messages overseas.

”These foreign language channels are becoming an important force in countering the hegemony of Western media and in bolstering our country’s soft power,” he said.

The Communist Party’s ”great firewall” blocks most overseas Chinese-language websites and many foreign-language overseas sites, and local internet companies must vigilantly screen and censor sensitive content.

Official censors, commercial internet operators and informal public opinion leaders – derisively labelled as China’s ”50 cent” army for the fees they receive per posting – are also deployed to push the government line on sensitive issues.

”Government agencies at all levels … have gradually built mechanisms to guide public opinion through integrating the functions of propaganda departments,” Mr Wang said.

Flickr Creative Commons | Rob Pongsajapan

By Anita Chang | The Associated Press | July 13, 2010

BEIJING — A leading Chinese Internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in China’s portion of cyberspace, calling for new rules to require people to use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, according to a human rights group.

In an address to the national legislature in April, Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, called for perfecting the extensive system of censorship the government uses to manage the fast-evolving Internet, according to a text of the speech obtained by New York-based Human Rights in China.

China’s regime has a complicated relationship with the freewheeling Internet, reflected in its recent standoff with Google over censorship of search results. China this week confirmed it had renewed Google’s license to operate, after it agreed to stop automatically rerouting users to its Hong Kong site, which is not subject to China’s online censorship.

The Internet is China’s most open and lively forum for discussion, despite already pervasive censorship, but stricter controls could constrain users. The country’s online population has surged past 400 million, making it the world’s largest.

Chen’s comments were reported only briefly when they were made in April. Human Rights in China said the government quickly removed a full transcript posted on the legislature’s website. But the group said it found an unexpurgated text and the discrepancies show that Beijing is wary that its push for tighter information control might prove unpopular.

Wang said holes that needed to be plugged included ways people could post comments or access information anonymously, according to the transcript published this week in the group’s magazine China Rights Forum.

“We will make the Internet real name system a reality as soon as possible, implement a nationwide cell phone real name system, and gradually apply the real name registration system to online interactive processes,” the journal quoted Wang as saying.

As part of that Internet “real name system,” forum moderators would have to use their real names as would users of online bulletin boards, and anonymous comments on news stories would be removed, Wang is quoted as saying.

The State Council Information Office did not immediately respond to a faxed request asking whether certain sections of Wang’s address to the legislature were altered in the official transcript.

Wang’s comments are in line with recent government statements that indicate a growing uneasiness toward the multitude of opinions found online. A Beijing-backed think tank this month accused the U.S. and other Western governments of using social-networking sites such as Facebook to spur political unrest and called for stepped-up scrutiny.

China has blocked sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, although technologically savvy users can easily jump the so-called “Great Firewall” with proxy servers or other alternatives. Websites about human rights and dissidents are also routinely banned.

Flickr Creative Commons | Craig Maccubbin

By David Barboza | The New York Times | July 9, 2010

SHANGHAI — The Internet giant Google said Friday that the Beijing government had renewed its license to operate a Web site in mainland China, ending months of tension after the company stopped censoring search results here and moved some operations out of the country.

Google made the announcement early Friday morning in California in a blog posting by its chief legal officer, David Drummond.

“We are very pleased that the government has renewed our I.C.P. license,” Mr. Drummond wrote referring to an Internet content provider license. “And we look forward to continuing to provide Web search and local products to our users in China.”

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said Friday that the renewal “was the outcome we were hoping for.”

Mr. Schmidt, who told reporters on Thursday that the company expected to obtain the renewal, said that he did not know China’s decision would come so soon and was informed of the decision early Friday. He had expected the decision to come down within 24 to 48 hours.

“We’ll keep doing what we’re doing, and they’ll keep doing what they’re doing,” he said Friday at the Allen & Company media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

If the license had not been renewed, Google would have effectively been forced to shut down its Web site, google.cn, in China. With the renewal, however, Google can continue offering limited services in China and direct users to the company’s uncensored Hong Kong-based Chinese language search engine, google.com.hk. Hong Kong, a former British colony that is now a special administrative region of China, is governed separately from the mainland. Under the current setup in mainland China, users can conduct a Google search and see the results, but often they cannot open the links.

The license renewal is a sign that Google, while uncomfortable with operating in China and censoring its search results on Beijing’s behalf, is determined to keep a foot in China, which now has more Internet users than the United States.

Google announced in January that it had suffered China-based cyberattacks on its databases and the e-mail accounts of some users. The company said it would also stop censoring search results, which it had agreed to do when it first began to operate in China several years ago. The Chinese government insists that its citizens’ access to the Internet be stripped of offensive and some politically sensitive material.

In March, Google closed its Internet search service in China and began directing users to the uncensored Hong Kong site.

Many analysts were stunned by the moves and questioned whether Google was acting prudently in risking its spot in the world’s largest Internet market.

Just a few weeks ago, however, Google signaled a softer approach to Beijing by saying that it had stopped automatically sending users in mainland China to its Hong Kong site. The company said it had created a Web page that offered users in mainland China a choice, rather than automatically directing them to its Hong Kong site.

The move, though seemingly insignificant, seemed to comply better with Beijing’s strict regulations.

“This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page,” Mr. Drummond wrote at the time.

Renewal is required annually for Google’s license, which officially expires in 2012.

“This is a reasonable move by the government,” Jake Li, an Internet analyst at Guotai Junan Securities in Shenzhen, told Bloomberg News. “Google has brought itself into compliance with regulations, so there’s no good reason to deny them the license.”

Even before the censorship issue came to the fore, Google was struggling in China to attain the same market dominance it has achieved in many other countries.

The hottest Internet companies in China are those like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local companies that are making huge profits.

Google is not the only American giant that has had trouble in China. Yahoo and eBay have failed to gain significant traction here. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Flickr Creative Commons | Dimitry Perstin

By Marianne Barriaux   | AFP | July 5, 2010

URUMQI, China — For Ruzmammat, the Internet is a crucial way of keeping in touch with his Uighur friends in China’s Xinjiang region — a lifeline that was denied to him for 10 months following deadly ethnic riots.

Authorities cut off the web in Xinjiang in the aftermath of violence that erupted a year ago in the regional capital Urumqi between mainly Muslim Uighurs and majority Han Chinese, leaving nearly 200 dead and 1,700 injured.

Access to dozens of websites, largely government-run or national web portals, was restored earlier this year, and most others came back on stream in May.

But three major portals used by Uighurs for news and discussion remain blocked — a reality which is hindering efforts by members of the Turkic-speaking minority to preserve their culture, experts say.

“If something big happens outside (Urumqi), that’s how we communicate,” said Ruzmammat, a 22-year-old web cafe employee in a mainly Uighur quarter of Urumqi, sitting at a computer as other men played games or chatted online.

“But we also use the sites for other stuff like finding jobs,” he said.

Authorities accused Uighurs inside and outside China of using the Internet to orchestrate the unrest last year and analysts say foreign Uighur-language websites remain inaccessible in the region as a result.

Such sites are “important for Uighurs wishing to be in contact with each other and with the outside world, and for the propagation of the Uighur language and culture,” said Michael Dillon, a Xinjiang expert based in Britain.

When the regional government announced the general restoration of Internet access in May, it warned that “anyone transmitting harmful information will be dealt with in accordance with the law”.

According to Ilham Tohti, an outspoken Uighur professor and blogger who lives in Beijing, many people who operated Uighur websites “have been thrown in prison or have disappeared” since the July 2009 unrest.

The Chinese government has further upped the stakes by requiring many website operators to register their names and claim responsibility for their content, creating a climate of fear, he told AFP in an interview in Beijing.

“Under this situation, many people involved in websites face great obstacles and a lot of pressure,” Tohti said.

He added that before the unrest in Urumqi, there had been a “lively” online discussion among Uighurs — deemed crucial amid tight restrictions on other publications such as magazines — but people were now scared to say much.

“With many websites closed, this has closed off our ability to debate, to exchange opinions,” he said.

China has long maintained an extensive nationwide system of Internet censorship, known as the “Great Firewall”, aimed at filtering out information deemed politically sensitive and harmful.

But the shutdown in Xinjiang went far beyond that. Paris-based media watchdog Reporters without Borders described it as the “longest ever case of government censorship of this kind”.

The government also cut text messaging services and international phone calls over fears of more unrest, isolating Xinjiang even further. These were only restored in January.

Despite this, people in the region still found ways to communicate within Xinjiang and with the outside world, according to Dru Gladney, an expert on Uighurs at Pomona College in California.

“They cut mobiles off for a while, but people used landlines and public phones, and they also smuggled out videos and photos on memory sticks,” he said.

“But it hurt the business people in the region and Han as well as Uighurs were very upset at being cut off because the Internet is so important for business.”

Tohti said Xinjiang’s 20 million people, nine million of whom are Uighurs, had been stripped of a “vital” tool of information for nearly a year.

“Today’s world is inseparable from the Internet. Whether it is entertainment, news, education, research, social contact or business, the Internet is indispensable,” he said.

Flickr Creative Commons | Simon Hua

Radio Free Asia | June 25, 2010

New controls on cybercafes reach Sichuan as Beijing publishes an Internet policy paper.

HONG KONG—Tough new regulations aimed at monitoring Internet usage are being rolled out across China, with Internet cafes in the southwestern province of Sichuan now requiring a swipe of smart ID cards before allowing people online.

“You have to have a second-generation ID card now,” an employee who answered the phone at one Internet cafe in the provincial capital, Chengdu, said. “And it has to belong to you.”

Local media reports said a new clampdown would get under way in Sichuan from June to September this year, following a similar police campaign in the central city of Wuhan, in which people using their relatives’ ID cards were taken into administrative detention.

Government regulations are calling for Internet cafes in the province to hook up their surveillance cameras to a central viewing channel monitored by the provincial government by the end of the year, with punishments and fines for businesses that do not comply.

Li Yonglong, an official of Internet management at the general office of the Sichuan provincial government, confirmed the crackdown is part of government policy.

“That’s correct,” he said, when asked to confirm news reports. However, he declined to give further details. “I can’t give interviews,” Li said. “There are rules here.”

Sichuan-based writer Ran Yunfei said that while the government claims that the new regulations are in place to protect underage netizens from inappropriate and pornographic content, they are also used by the ruling Communist Party to limit content that Chinese netizens can view online.

“This won’t affect me too much because I rarely use Internet cafes, but not everyone’s like me. Our rights should be protected,” Ran said.

He said that hidden behind the government’s management of Internet cafes is an attempt to limit the explosion of public opinion that has occurred on Chinese Web sites in recent years.

And Beijing-based author Yu Jie said the scheme infringes upon the rights of ordinary people to privacy.

The ’safe flow of information’

The move to control and monitor access to the Internet through public cybercafes was initiated last year, as the government made it harder for Internet cafes to start up in business and announced a series of franchises for nationwide chains.

Last September, government-backed Internet Cafe Associations in 30 major Chinese cities and provinces issued a statement titled Self-regulating Declaration on Cleaning Up the Internet Cafe Industry, vowing to abide by China’s laws and regulations concerning the Internet.

In a policy paper on the Internet issued earlier this month, the Chinese government said it attaches “great importance” to the “safe” flow of information online, and seeks to “actively guide” people to manage Web sites “in a wholesome and correct way.”

It lists as forbidden any content that “endangers state security,” “divulges state secrets,” or “subverts state power”—all  charges that have been levied against prominent dissidents and human rights activists in recent years in Chinese courts, often resulting in lengthy prison sentences.

Any content that  jeopardizes “ethnic unity,” interferes with government religious policies, propagates “heretical or superstitious ideas,” or “disrupts social stability” is also banned, according to the regulations governing China’s Internet.

Such charges have been brought against Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other ethnic minorities who voice open disagreement with or protest against Beijing’s policies in their homelands, or who call peacefully for independence or greater autonomy from Chinese rule.

According to Rebecca MacKinnon, visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, the White Paper shows that Beijing is consciously developing its control of the Internet as part of its authoritarian rule, and intends also to wield influence over how it develops internationally.

“The Chinese government is not running scared from the Internet,” MacKinnon wrote in a June 15 blog post titled China’s Internet White Paper: Networked Authoritarianism in Action.

“It is embracing the Internet head-on, intends to be a leader in its global evolution, and intends to assert its influence on how the global Internet is governed and regulated.”

Original reporting in Mandarin by Xin Yu. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated from the Chinese and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

At Yahoo!, we strongly believe that the complex global issues of privacy and free expression are best addressed with a collective approach, which is why we are co-founding members of the Global Network Initiative (GNI). As such, we welcome engagement and constructive solutions from all of our stakeholders, including NGOs such as Amnesty.

Transparency is also important, so we would like to make sure that our users are aware of our efforts and have the opportunity to communicate with us directly. We are reaching out to Amnesty directly (as we have done in the past) and are sending letters to those users who took the time to write us and share their concerns. In the interest of transparency, we are also sharing our response to Amnesty with you. Please see below for our letter, with details of the steps that we have taken. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments, or via e-mail. We look forward to the dialogue, and to continuing to work with all of our stakeholders to protect and promote privacy and free expression in the ICT sector.

***
Dr. Morton Winston
Address Redacted

Dear Dr. Winston;

Thank you for your interest in learning more about Yahoo!’s commitment to human rights around the world.

Yahoo! was founded on the principle that promoting access to information can improve people’s lives and enhance their relationship with the world around them. The continued imprisonment of Shi Tao is of great concern, particularly given our deep commitment to human rights and desire to be a leader among technology companies in this area.

Yahoo! continues to actively push for the release of Shi Tao, Wang Xioaning and other Chinese dissidents. We have asked the U.S. government to use its leverage to create a global environment where Internet freedom is a priority and where people are no longer imprisoned for expressing their views online. Our former CEO Jerry Yang has met personally with senior State Department officials, and in 2008 wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging the State Department to redouble its efforts to secure the release of imprisoned Chinese dissidents. Secretary Rice subsequently raised this issue with senior Chinese officials, and since then we have seen Members of Congress echo this call for U.S. diplomatic leadership. We also wrote a letter in December of 2009 to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton and spoke with Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner in May of 2010, urging the State Department to continue to advocate for the release of Shi Tao, Wang Xioaning and other Chinese dissidents. We hope these continuing efforts will both intensify and bear fruit.

Yahoo! has not owned or had operational control over Yahoo! China since 2005. However, through our minority stake as well as our membership on the board of Alibaba (which owns and operates Yahoo! China) we have been able to successfully encourage some concrete changes so that Chinese citizens can have a greater understanding of the risks and benefits of going online in China. For example, Yahoo! China search pages contain a notice announcing that certain search results may be limited as a result of Chinese law and the Yahoo! China Mail registration page notes to users that the service is subject to Chinese law.

Yahoo! is committed to protecting human rights and freedom of expression around the world, including in China. As a result, we have partnered with noted dissident and human rights activist Harry Wu and the Laogai Research Foundation to establish the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund. This fund provides humanitarian and legal support to political dissidents who have been imprisoned for expressing their views online, as well as assistance for their families. We also provide financial, humanitarian and legal support to the families of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning.

As you are aware, in order to incorporate lessons learned into future business practices, we created Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program in 2008 (http://ycorpblog.com/2008/05/07/business-and-human-rights/). This first of its kind initiative represents a fundamental corporate commitment to human rights. Among other concrete actions, the BHRP conducts a formal assessment of the potential human rights impact of business decisions. Yahoo! then designs and implements mitigation strategies that limit potential risks to free expression and privacy. To further raise awareness about these critical issues and to contribute to the development of concrete solutions, Yahoo! has established international fellowships at Stanford University and Georgetown University to advance the work of journalists and scholars exploring the complex issues at the intersection of technology, free expression, privacy and global values. In 2009, we also launched the Business & Human Rights Summit, an annual stakeholder engagement and shared learning event. You can learn more about Yahoo!’s individual and collective efforts at Yahoo! at http://humanrights.yahoo.com.

At Yahoo!, we believe that the cause of human rights is more effectively advanced through collective action. As a result, Yahoo! is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics committed to protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy online. As you know, given Amnesty’s earlier role in the GNI, GNI formally launched in November of 2008. Since then, Yahoo!, along with fellow participating companies, has agreed to incorporate GNI’s Implementation Guidelines and Governance, Accountability and Learning Framework into our business operations. The Implementation Guidelines and Accountability Framework hold us accountable to our commitments through a number of concrete mechanisms, including independent third-party assessments. You can learn more about the GNI, including details about governance and accountability mechanisms, at http://globalnetworkinitiative.org.

At Yahoo! we will continue to explore how to do more to protect freedom of expression in the markets where we operate. As you know, an important component of the GNI process and of Yahoo!’s approach to these issues is continuous engagement with stakeholders, including NGOs like Amnesty International. We encourage Amnesty to join us in the GNI as we create concrete solutions to the privacy and free expression challenges in the ICT sector; we would welcome the opportunity to have a constructive dialogue.

I appreciate your interest in this important issue, and invite you to contact me directly with your recommendations, and to learn more about Yahoo!’s actions and GNI’s progress.

Respectfully,
Ebele Okobi-Harris
Director, Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program

Flickr Creative Commons | Tomislavmedak

Here’s an illuminating post from RConversation, Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog on China’s recently released “White Paper on the Internet in China“.

China’s Internet White Paper: networked authoritarianism in action

The release of the Chinese government’s first-ever White Paper on the Internet in China provoked some head-scratching here in the Western world. Part Three of the six-part document is titled “Guaranteeing Citizens’ Freedom of Speech on the Internet.” I’ve heard from several journalists and policy analysts (not people based in China, for whom such cognitive dissonance is normal) who at first glance thought they were reading The Onion or some kind of parody site. How, people asked me, can a government that so blatantly censors the Internet claim with a straight face to be protecting and upholding freedom of speech on the Internet? The answer of course is that China’s netizens are free to do everything… except for the things they’re not free to do.  The list of the latter, outlined in the next section titled Protecting Internet Security is long, vague, and subject to considerable interpretation:

…The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safe flow of Internet information, actively guides people to manage websites in accordance with the law and use the Internet in a wholesome and correct way. The Decision of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee on Guarding Internet Security, Regulations on Telecommunications of the People’s Republic of China and Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services stipulate that no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information having the following contents: being against the cardinal principles set forth in the Constitution; endangering state security, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing national unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime; humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.

Other than that, people are totally free. What’s more, the use of the Internet by the people to “supervise” public officials is praised. As long as – in the process of said supervision – state power is not subverted, “state honor” is not jeopardized, nobody is humiliated or slandered, and no “rumors” are spread. The rise of Twitter-like microblogging services is even praised. (Twitter itself is blocked by the “great firewall,” though tens of thousands of Chinese Internet users are believed to access it anyway through third-party clients and circumvention tools).

As I’ve frequently pointed out in the past (see here, here and here for starters), blocking of foreign websites like Twitter is just the top layer of Chinese Internet censorship. Beneath the “great firewall of China” is a sophisticated system by which censorship is delegated to the private sector. The first company to set up a Chinese Twitter-clone was a startup called Fanfou. Last June they got shut down because they failed to police the service adequately: users apparently shared too much content that violated the above no-no list. Other micro-blog services have since emerged. One run by the People’s Daily and another by the popular web portal Sina.com. They seem to have learned from Fanfou’s troubles and have put aggressive censorship systems in place. As Chen Tong, Sina’s head editor, recently commented at a 3G Wireless Industry Summit: “controlling content in Sina microblogs is a problem which is a very big headache.” (The Shanghaiist blog reports that the Sina.com news article reporting Chen’s comments has itself been censored, but not before getting quoted and reported around the Internet.) According to the Sina.com account of his remarks, Chen went on to describe Sina’s microblog-censorship strategy in some detail: 24-7 policing; constant coordination between the editorial department and the “monitoring department” (all social networking companies in China must have one of those in order to stay in compliance with government expectations);  daily meetings; and systems through which both editors and users are constantly reporting problematic content.

Even so, Chen Tong says in his speech that microblogging has been tremendously empowering in China. He says that micro-blogs have become “people’s personal web portals” and that a lot of recent incidents that have generated widespread public concern first emerged on microblogs.

Despite all the policing and the round-the-clock censorship, Chinese Internet users still feel much more empowered to participate in public discourse and even bring issues to national attention than they ever could have imagined in the past. (See Guobin Yang’s excellent book, The Power of the Internet in China for many examples.) As I described it to one journalist, it’s as if a bird that has lived in a cage all its life (one which has been gradually upgraded, with steadily improving food and which is much cleaner than it used to be) suddenly gets released into a large atrium. The bird is likely to feel excited and empowered for quite some time and may not realize that even broader freedom is possible or even desirable: after all, without the atrium walls might she get lost and starve? Or get eaten by other birds? There are plenty of security arguments in favor of supporting the atrium’s legitimacy and necessity; there are even ethical justifications.

Thus China is pioneering what I call “networked authoritarianism.” Compared to classic authoritarianism, networked authoritarianism permits – or shall we say accepts the Internet’s inevitable consequences and adjusts – a lot more give-and-take between government and citizens than in a pre-Internet authoritarian state. While one party remains in control, a wide range of conversations about the country’s problems rage on websites and social networking services. The government follows online chatter, and sometimes people are even able to use the Internet to call attention to social problems or injustices, and even manage to have an impact on government policies. As a result, the average person with Internet or mobile access has a much greater sense of freedom – and may even feel like they have the ability to speak and be heard – in ways that weren’t possible under classic authoritarianism. It also makes most people a lot less likely to join a movement calling for radical political change. In many ways, the regime actually uses the Internet not only to extend its control but also to enhance its legitimacy.

At the same time, in the networked authoritarian state there is no guarantee of individual rights and freedoms. People go to jail when the powers-that-be decide they are too much of a threat – and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Truly competitive, free and fair elections do not happen. The courts and the legal system are tools of the ruling party.

Connecting every citizen in China to the Internet via multiple devices might sound like something the Chinese Communist Party would want to avoid. Several people who contacted me about China’s Internet White Paper were surprised at the Chinese government’s enthusiasm for connectivity. Such enthusiasm does not jive with most American and European notions of how an authoritarian state would be run by a party that calls itself Communist. What’s important to understand is that Chinese authoritarianism in the Internet age is not the same as the crumbling, centrally-planned authoritarianism of the Eastern Bloc, disconnected from the Western capitalist world.

The CCP leadership recognizes that they can’t control everybody all the time if they’re going to be a technologically advanced global economic powerhouse. What’s more, high Internet penetration is necessary if the Chinese government wants to continue high rates of economic growth, which economists agree requires boosting domestic consumer demand as well as pushing Chinese companies to the cutting edge of technological innovation.  China catapulted itself to become the world’s second largest economy by turning itself into the world’s factory. But Chinese labor has grown expensive compared to some other markets in poorer countries. In order to stay competitive and keep growing, China needs to transition from a manufacturing-fueled economy to an economy fueled by domestic consumption at home, while being an innovator for advanced technologies and services that can compete with American and European companies.

Another component of the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy involves influencing the Internet’s technical evolution in ways that are most compatible with censorship and surveillance goals. China already has more Internet users than there are Americans on the planet. As the world’s biggest market for Internet technologies, it is starting to influence how these technologies evolve. The Internet is quickly morphing from something we’ve mainly used through our computers into a new, more mobile phase in which all devices, appliances and vehicles – from our phones to our cars to our refrigerators – will be connected to the network. The Chinese government is embracing this future. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao now gives speeches in which he waxes enthusiastic about the “Internet of things.” Chinese Internet and telecommunications companies receive substantial government support in hopes that they will lead the world in shaping the next generation of Internet technologies.

Beyond China, the fastest-growing markets for mobile Internet technologies are in Asia, the Middle East and Africa: exactly those parts of the world where authoritarian governments are most concentrated. Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE (the “Ciscos of China”) are already dominant in many African and Middle Eastern markets. They are building Internet and mobile networks in countries whose governments would prefer to have their systems built by Chinese engineers rather than by Americans.

Another thing that has puzzled some of the American journalists and analysts who contacted me is the Chinese government’s assertion of its “sovereignty” on the Internet, given that the Internet is a globally inter-connected network and derives much of its value from the fact that borders are collapsed online. Yet at the same time, it’s a physical reality that web sites have to be hosted physically on computers that are located in some jurisdiction or another; they are operated by physical human beings who reside under a government jurisdiction and can thus be physically controlled when necessary; they are operated by businesses that have to be registered in one or more jurisdiction and their physical operations are subject to government regulation; and the Internet runs on networks that physically exist within or pass through nation-states. The White Paper is a clear articulation of the Chinese government’s long-standing position that nation-states should have “sovereignty” over all aspects of the Internet – human or equipment or signal – that reside within or pass through Chinese sovereign territory. Google is challenging this notion as it pushes the U.S. government to take action against China for violating WTO rules by using censorship as a barrier to trade. (For further discussion of China and Internet sovereignty see this Interview with Columbia University’s Tim Wu conducted by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos.)

The White Paper also re-emphasizes the Chinese government’s long-standing position that the global coordination tasks required to make the Internet function – what Internet policy wonks call “Internet governance” – are best left to governments, not private entities or companies or others.  The White Paper did not condemn ICANN, the private non-profit which coordinates the Internet’s domain name system – in fact it didn’t even mention ICANN or other non-governmental organizations that coordinate the Internet’s functions and anoint preferred global technical standards. Nor did it say anything negative about the “multi-stakeholder” governance approach currently favored by Western democracies, which includes non-governmental “civil society” organizations alongside governments and companies. But the document made clear China’s position that ” the UN should be given full scope in international Internet administration.” As Brendan Kuerbis of the Internet Governance Project puts it, China is not intending to disengage from the existing Internet governance frameworks, but can be expected to exert its influence in shaping these frameworks in its preferred direction.

The White Paper’s message is that the Chinese government is not running scared from the Internet. It is embracing the Internet head-on, intends to be a leader in its global evolution, and intends to assert its influence on how the global Internet is governed and regulated.

Note that China is not the only country seeking to assert its brand of Internet sovereignty. For an analysis of what’s happening in Russia, read this chilling overview by Gregory Aslomov at Global Voices. For more on the Russia situation as well as an alarming global overview, be sure to read “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace” just published by the Open Net Initiative.

On a more optimistic note, the White Paper does have its domestic critics. Blogger, journalist and journalism professor Hu Yong argues (writing on a domestic blog which has not been censored) that most of the regulations governing the Chinese Internet have no clear basis in Chinese law and are arguably unconstitutional. “At a time when the Internet is raising a lot of questions that we don’t have answers to,” he writes, “the government may not have the best solutions. It’s possible that the Internet could give birth to new forms of regulation that aren’t as coercive, and which place greater trust in the strength of individual freedom and the self-governance of citizens.” While the Internet does need to be regulated, he concludes, the public needs to participate in the creation of those regulations.

But as long as all of China’s Internet companies and the few foreign Internet companies with a local presence in China continue to do whatever the government demands, no matter how little legal or constitutional legitimacy such demands might have, the government will have little incentive to accept the kind of change that Hu Yong envisions. Note that many of the big Chinese companies receive American investment dollars or are publicly traded on U.S. stock exchanges, sending a clear message that whatever U.S. elected officials might say about “Internet freedom,” many American investors are quite happy to profit from China’s status quo.

–

Rebecca MacKinnon

Visiting Fellow, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University

Co-founder, GlobalVoicesOnline.org

Cell: +1-617-939-3493

E-mail: rebecca.mackinnon@gmail.com

Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/rmack

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