Vancouver Sun: Activists Caught in China's Web

October 23, 2004

Wang Yuzhi's hands tightened into fists, her gentle facial features hardened, and tears welled in her eyes as she described nine months of detention and torture in China.

The Falun Gong practitioner, now living in Vancouver, clearly understands the terrible price of lost privacy when Chinese government authorities monitor Internet and private e-mail communications.

She had become one of the cyber dissidents imprisoned in China, the country Reporters Without Borders described this year as "the world's biggest prison for cyber dissidents."

China not only boasts almost 80 million Internet users, it is also responsible for jailing more cyber dissidents than all other countries combined.

It has jailed 60 of the 68 cyber dissidents worldwide for what it considers improper Internet communications.

Wang, 49, was jailed in June 2001 when Chinese officials arrested her for the third time after a reward had been posted for her arrest when she continued pro-Falun Gong activities.

Wang said she was arrested attempting to withdraw money from the bank after authorities narrowed down her location through monitoring Internet communications.

In jail she was subjected to brutal force feeding, with tubes being forced through her nose and her mouth. Coarse cornmeal in cold water was pushed into her body.

Her face became a bloody, infected mess of wounds. She thought she might go blind.

"I did not know whether I would be alive or dead, but I really have a strong will to live,"

Wang said through an interpreter who translated her Mandarin into English in an interview.

"The pain was even worse than giving birth," Wang said of the forced feeding that brutalized her body, bashed out her teeth and, on some occasions, almost suffocated her.

Reporters Without Borders' Canadian president Tanya Churchmuch said the Chinese have a system of monitoring and censoring news which is much more subtle than a country such as Cuba, where only a select core of the population are permitted Internet access.

"They do things which are a lot less obvious. They have hundreds of thousands of sites which are blocked, different subject matter, like the Falun Gong.

"Say somebody tries to log on (to a banned site), all it will do is redirect you saying something like: 'Server down. Website not found.'

"It seems much more innocuous. It does not actually say: 'You are not allowed to see this site.'"

Many of those caught in China's cyber monitoring do not consider themselves dissidents.

"Much of it is young people or even students asking questions about Tiananmen Square or talking about anything to do with any kind of liberties, religious freedoms or anything like that who get traced back and they are ultimately arrested."

The Paris-based international reporters' organization's hopes that the Internet would aid pro-democracy, human-rights and religious groups in China have been damaged.

"Initial hopes that the Internet would develop into an unfettered media and help liberalize China have been dashed," an online report stated.

"Many Chinese Internet users are very inventive and have the technical know-how to evade Beijing's censorship. But the reinforcement of filtering measures since the start of 2004 has made it much harder to access independent information.

"At the same time, exiled dissidents are becoming more active and effective."

[...]

Jack He, a Vancouver software programmer, is one of those quietly involved in the cyber battle.

"I understand the situation in China. I know how they block the Internet. I know how people are trying to help people in China to break the blockage," he said before acknowledging he was active in aiding the flow of information.

"I know how they use the Internet to persecute Falun Gong practitioners," he said.

He was wary about saying anything too specific out of fear he would jeopardize efforts to assist the flow of information in and out of China, or bring more unwanted attention from the Chinese government down on Falun Gong [practitioners], of which he is one.

He said he did not want to reveal details of how he and people like him are aiding dissidents in penetrating the so-called golden shield that China has been constructing since 1998.

The golden shield has become more sophisticated as cyber dissidents search for ways to beat the system, according to a paper entitled Breaking Through the Golden Shield, written by He.

Censorship began by merely blocking Internet protocol addresses, preventing web surfers from accessing pages the Chinese government decided should be off limits.

But when dissidents began using overseas Internet protocol addresses to access banned pages they found a way around the censors for a time.

Media websites such as CNN, the BBC, Voice of America, and Falun Gong are among the hundreds of thousands of blocked pages.

Chinese censors responded with detection systems that could detect such proxy pages by recognizing offensive content within the pages.

The same principle was applied to e-mail, He wrote in his report.

Keyword filtering of e-mail servers was required by the state. Similarly, discussion forums were ordered to install filter systems to block key words relating to pornography, religion, politics and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Internet cafes in China are also required to examine government identification cards before someone is permitted to access the Internet.

Surveillance software approved by police is installed and sometimes computer screens are monitored, according to He's article.

University of Toronto associate professor Ron Deibert is director of the Citizen Lab at the University's Munk Centre for International Studies, which, along with the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, has researched the extent of China's censorship and how it can be defeated.

Deibert and his colleagues ran tests that demonstrated the popular Google search engine had been manipulated by the Chinese so that searches done within China do not find pages offensive to the Chinese censors.

"We can tell a lot about what they do not want people to know," Deibert said of the testing.

The Citizen Lab also played a part in assisting human-rights organizations in establishing proxy computers to defeat the blocking by the Chinese.

Deibert says that someone doing work in China as he does in Toronto would be jailed.

He said the abilities of the Chinese authorities to detect attempts to circumvent their blocking and monitoring have become much more sophisticated.

"China stands alone among countries worldwide with the money that is put into this and the matrix which is in place," he said.

"There are people that I work with that have been in grave danger doing this stuff, so we have to take very seriously their security."

He said they have seen their research result in positive outcomes for the organizations with which Citizen Lab works, but said it would be dangerous to reveal the details.

"I just cannot get into the specifics of it, because it would disclose the methods which we are using," he said.

Another organization assisting Chinese cyber dissidents is Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., a U.S. company headed by Bill Xia, a former Chinese national.

Xia also established a proxy network so people accessing the Internet in China could visit banned websites.

"We deliver software to users in China. With this client software they are going to find our network, connect to our network so that people can visit any website which they want," he said in a telephone interview.

(Xia was so concerned about his personal security that he insisted his location be described only as the east coast of the U.S.)

He said the software they have made available to hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users is so easy to operate it can be installed by double clicking.

He said encryption systems in the software would allow a person in China to evade censors and access a Falun Gong web- site.

Xia, who also practises Falun Gong, said he travelled to the U.S. to complete his education and was amazed when he learned of all the information which had been denied to people within China about their own country.

Now, Chinese people use his technology to learn about subjects forbidden by the Chinese government.

"There are many stories which China tried to keep under control," he said. He said the government kept a tight lid on how bad the SARS epidemic was in China and how dangerous it was to its citizens.

"At the beginning the government was saying it was not dangerous at all and almost nobody died [saying] 'It's fine you do not have to take any precautions.'."

Dynamic Internet Technology has provided assistance to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Human Rights in China, Xia said.

New York-based Human Rights in China executive director Sharon Hom said assistance from organizations such as Dynamic Internet Technology has been vital for her organization.

As well as lobbying for more than 2,000 individual dissidents within China, Human Rights in China has documented examples of prisoner mistreatment, and brought it to the attention of the UN and other international bodies.

They are also using technology supplied by organizations such as DIT to provide access to information for pro-democracy and human-rights advocates in China.

People who have assisted the organization from within China have often paid a high personal price.

"They are in prison. They are suffering repression. They are under heavy surveillance or they are losing jobs," she said.

"On the other hand, despite very high costs, people are trying."

While academics, human-rights advocates, and some corporations attempt to assist the flow of information to and from China, Wang Yuzhi recounts her tale of torture as many times as it is necessary.

"Every time she recalls this experience it's very painful, but she is still willing because here in this society people do not really realize what is going on over there," the interpreter explained for Wang.

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