Taipei Times: US Tech Firms Help Repress Chinese

The Chinese media recently reported attacks by Falun Gong members on the Sinosat-1 satellite aimed at blocking China Central Television broadcasts. The media used this as an excuse to launch fierce criticism against Falun Gong, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.

Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) said that the attacks were launched from outside China, the police in Hong Kong hurriedly began an investigation. Some reports even said the attack was launched from Yangmingshan in Taiwan. At the time of writing, however, no Falun Gong [practitioner] has claimed responsibility for the attack. Some believe, in fact, that this is a plot by the CCP designed to further discredit the Falun Gong movement.

No matter what one believes, however, beginning on Jan. 1 this year, Falun Gong has interrupted cable-TV broadcasts in Chong-qing, Changchun, Harbin and certain cities in Shandong Province in order to refute various misconceptions stemming from the CCP's defamation campaign. Despite the CCP's best efforts, these broadcast interruptions still occur. What's more, the cities in which broadcasts have been interrupted have large numbers of unemployed workers -- an indication that Falun Gong's influence is stronger among disadvantaged populations in those areas. This is an attempt to break the party's monopoly on information.

Another important weapon for Chinese dissidents -- including Falun Gong members -- is electronic warfare. This is also carried out by some media in the West. Apart from building Web sites to disseminate information to people in China, dissidents also send information that the party refuses to allow to be made public to private e-mail addresses.

This is, however, becoming more and more difficult, since the party, with the help of US-based high-tech companies such as Cisco, has established increasingly effective firewalls. It is regrettable that those US multinationals, considering only their own profits, happily help the Chinese dictators to suppress China's democracy movement.

E-mail in China has also begun to show security flaws. In April, the overseas headquarters of the China Democracy Party (CDP) made an announcement that e-mails sent to China by way of Yahoo China were completely accessible to China's Internet police. The Internet police have not only succeeded in preventing the CDP's second-tier organizations within the country from sending or receiving e-mail, but have also invaded and damaged e-mail accounts while monitoring the organization's on-line recruitment of members. This is because the server for Yahoo China is located inside China.

In June, President Jiang Zemin visited Iceland and on July 1 he went to Hong Kong for the celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong's return to China. In both cases, Beijing gave the local authorities lists of people to be denied entry into the country. It is suspected that some of the names were stolen from e-mails because certain people who regularly appear at demonstrations got through without any trouble, while others, who hadn't previously appeared in person but had participated in the transmission of e-mails, were blacklisted. This has prompted some Falun Gong practitioners and dissidents to change e-mail addresses that may have been compromised.

There have also been reports that during routine exercises northwest of Okinawa, the electronic communications of the aircraft carrier group of the US Seventh Fleet were interfered with by a Chinese warship that had come to monitor the exercise. In response, the US military launched the largest electronic battle that region has seen in years to thoroughly paralyze all PLA communications along the entire coast of China north of Fujian Province.

Similar skirmishes have occured before -- for example in May 1999 when NATO mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and in April last year when a Chinese J-8 fighter crashed after bumping into a US EP-3 surveillance aircraft. On both occasions, Beijing is said to have turned a blind eye to Chinese hackers who attacked US government Web sites. If these rumors are true, electronic warfare is already very much a feature of Sino-US interaction.

This smokeless war that Western nations and grassroots activists in China are waging represents a major threat to China's authoritarian regime. For US high-tech companies to lose sight of the big picture and aid Beijing in its tyranny, however, would be most unfortunate for China, the US and the entire world.