China blanks Nobel Peace prize searches

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Laihiuyeung Ryanne

By Steven Jiang | CNN World | October 8, 2010

Beijing, China (CNN) — With news media across the globe reacting to this year’s Nobel Peace Prize announcement, authorities in the winner’s homeland are racing to delete his name from all public domains.

Type “Liu Xiaobo” — or “Nobel Peace Prize,” for that matter — in search engines in China and hit return, you get a blaring error page.

It’s the same for the country’s increasingly popular micro-blogging sites. “Nobel Prize” was the top-trending topic until the authorities acted to remove all mentions of the award.

Propaganda officials have also pulled the plug on international broadcasters — including CNN — whenever stories about Liu air.

Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: “My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize.”

For most ordinary Chinese, the only glimpse of the story came when an anchor read a short statement from the foreign ministry on state TV, blasting the Norwegian Nobel committee’s choice of an imprisoned Chinese dissident for the prize “a blasphemy.”

Chinese news consumers are no strangers to such blackouts.

The Chinese government, in its effort to control the flow of information, has long blocked some of the world’s top social networking sites – including Facebook, Youtube and most overseas-based blogging services.

Disagreements over Internet censorship led to a war of words between Beijing and Google early this year, leading the search engine giant to redirect its Chinese services to Hong Kong.

Frustrated netizens have dubbed the state’s extensive Internet filtering system the “Great Firewall of China,” which is said to employ the world’s biggest cyber police force to monitor the world’s biggest online population of more than 400 million people.

An increasing number of mostly young, tech-savvy users, however, have learned to rely on proxy servers to circumvent the censors and log on to banned sites like Twitter, where the mood was ecstatic Friday night.

“We finally have our own Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi,” exclaimed @xieyi64.

“How come I feel today is the real National Day?” tweeted @joeliang, referring to the just-ended week-long holiday marking the 61st anniversary of the People’s Republic.

Echoing their sentiment, many Twitterers — based in China according to their profiles — admitted they have cried in joy upon hearing the news.

Others expressed admiration for the Norwegian Nobel committee for its decision despite Beijing’s stern public warning against it.

“Thanks for giving China a glimmer of hope,” tweeted @Frankus21, while many more said they paid their tribute to the Scandinavian nation by eating a celebratory dinner featuring salmon, arguably Norway’s most famous food.

With the news blackout there was also little criticism online of the Nobel award.

But some of the online enthusiasm has even spilled into the real world. A witness told CNN a small group of people gathered at Temple of Earth Park in Beijing to celebrate Liu’s winning, only to be quickly dispersed by local police.

All the excitement aside, Chinese Internet users don’t see their government loosening its grip on the media – old or new – anytime soon. They do hope, however, that their collective voice online will help push for Liu’s early release.

Liu’s wife, speaking to CNN after the announcement, certainly counts on these messengers to spread her husband’s story.

“People who want to find out the news will be able to do so,” Liu Xia told CNN under the watchful eyes of police in her apartment, when asked about China’s censoring of the story.

China Requires ID for Mobile Phone Numbers

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Windell Oskay

By Michael Wines | New York Times | September 1, 2010

BEIJING — China’s government began on Wednesday to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an attempt to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes.

The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that force users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users currently are unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish an ID by 2013 or lose their service, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper, Global Times, reported.

A government center that deals with cellphone complaints reported that an average Chinese phone user receives a dozen spam messages a week, and that three in four users received messages that involved fraud, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Wednesday.

Some analysts, however, questioned whether the new requirement would substantially reduce illicit messages. Instead, they warned that it could give the government new tools to locate and punish individuals who send cellphone messages that censors deem unacceptable. China’s central government has steadily tightened its censorship of the Internet and wireless communications since 2008, blocking increasing numbers of Internet Web sites, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and, most recently, shutting down microblogs that it regards as subversive.

The new regulation will be implemented largely by the three government-controlled companies — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — that provide all cellular service.

“Is China prepared for this?” David Bandurski, an author and media analyst at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a telephone interview. “Does it have the legal framework and the institutions in place to guarantee they can do this and still protect the privacy of consumers?

“People are basically providing their phone numbers and ID numbers” to the mobile carriers, he said. “Those are the two most important pieces of information that most people have.”

In an article posted Wednesday on the China Media Project’s Web site, a legal researcher at the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhou Hanhua, expressed doubts that requiring users to register their names with the companies would control spam.

Initially, he wrote, the rules likely will first create a black market in legally registered SIM cards that can be used for spam, and then spur hackers to find ways to circumvent the registration requirement.

“Technology innovation will soon trump the government’s control,” he wrote.

Others were less concerned. A professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Zeng Jianqiu, said that real-name registration was essential if services now common in other nations, such as payment by cellphone, are to become established in China.

Privacy “is a problem that needs to be considered seriously,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “The regulators and mobile operators also need to find ways to protect personal information. But I think some, like China Mobile and Telecom, are already doing this.”

Under the new policy, convenience store and street vendors who have been selling anonymous SIM cards were to suspend sales on Wednesday until they are trained to register their customers. Foreigners will also be required to furnish a passport or other identification when establishing cellphone service.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Tibet Steps Up Web Controls

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | SFTHQ

By He Ping & Yang Jiadai | Radio Free Asia | August 2, 2010

HONG KONG—Chinese authorities in Tibet have ordered Internet cafes across the region to finish installing state-of-the-art surveillance systems by the end of the month, industry sources and local media said.

“All the Internet cafes must now install it,” said Chen Jianying, head of the customer service department of the industry group Internet Cafes Online.

“This is a nationwide policy which is part of the implementation of the real-name registration system,” Chen said.

According to a report carried on the official China Tibet News website last week titled “Long-range Surveillance of the Internet,” all computers installed in enterprises that offer services to the public must install the system.

The proprietor of an Internet cafe in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, which is still under tight security following widespread Tibetan unrest beginning in March 2008, confirmed the scheme is already in full swing.

He said he had already been to the police station for training in how to run the system.

“The system should be up and running now,” the business owner said. “I heard the technical people saying that the last time I attended a meeting.”

“It’s pretty convenient because they can configure it directly from higher up if the guidelines change.”

He said the new system will mean tighter online controls.

“If there is something that is being controlled, there’s no way anyone will get to see it. It’s definitely a tighter form of control,” he said.

The China Tibet News website also reported that the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) government has already inaugurated its long-range surveillance system.

Calls to the cultural department of the TAR government went unanswered during office hours Friday.

Youth ‘guidance’

Local media also reported that the department has dispatched engineers throughout Tibet to install the new system in individual Internet cafes, and to train business owners and technical staff in its operation.

Funding is already in place for the project, and all Internet cafes in the region are now effectively implementing a real-name registration system.

Under the nationwide scheme, which took effect Aug. 1, second-generation identity cards belonging to the person using the Internet must be swiped to allow online access. Viewed content can then be traced back to that identity, using the the surveillance system.

One of the touted benefits of the scheme is that it aims to prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content online.

But Zhang Tianliang, an electronic engineer and professor at George Mason University, said he believes there is another motive behind the move.

“There has to be a question mark over why the government is installing such a surveillance system in Tibet right now,” Zhang said.

“The Chinese Communist Party has always used cleaning up pornography as an excuse.”

Retired Nanjing University professor and civil rights activist Sun Wenguang agreed.

“You can’t control young people on the Internet,” Sun said. “Of course their parents can exercise appropriate guidance.”

“The starting point of the whole real-name registration policy is that they are afraid that [viewers] will see content from outside China, content that they are trying to block,” he added.

“Real-name registration will limit the amount of external information that young people are able to see, and I think that is undesirable.”

Original reporting in Mandarin by He Ping and Yang Jiadai and in Cantonese by Hai Nan. Translated from the Chinese and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

Uyghur Webmasters Sentenced

By Tsering

2010/07/Gusjer1-e1280519957731.jpg

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.

China’s star blogger treads fine line

By Tsering

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.”

Information Bridging on the Case of Tibetan Environmentalist Karma Samdrup

By Tsering

By Dechen Pemba | Global Voices Online | July 21, 2010 

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.

China’s plan to use internet for propaganda

By Tsering

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.

China seeks to reduce Internet users’ anonymity

By Tsering

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.

China Renews Google’s License

By Tsering

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.

Web blocks remain one year on for China’s Uighurs

By Tsering

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.