Taipei Times (Taiwan): China's Web Censorship Has Lessons for Taiwan

By Paul Lin

September 26, 2002

China tightened its restrictions on the Internet recently, blocking access to the search engines Google and Alta Vista. Fortunately, these Web sites did not cave in to China's pressure. Google even said it would provide a different, moving portal site every day to break China's blockade. This means tackling China's "battlefield warfare" with "guerilla warfare." Faced with a tough opponent, China has turned to other strategies, one of which is to redirect users to other Web sites. The other is to allow access to the search engines in question but block Web pages that contain sensitive content, such as Falun Gong or President Jiang Zemin.

In the latest development, e-mail users who applied for Yahoo and Hotmail addresses from within China are prevented from opening their mail boxes whenever they receive an e-mail containing "sensitive" words. Netizens are complaining about this on the Web but they can do nothing about it. This indicates that China has improved its Internet blockade technology. Sending information from overseas to people in China has now become much more difficult. An online magazine run by overseas Chinese pro-democracy activists (www.bignews.org) has also received letters from readers asking for a moving Web site.

Foreign media have reported that it was US high-tech companies that provided China with the blocking technologies. Major companies including Cisco Systems, Nokia, Microsoft and Israel's CheckPoint Software Technologies are all vying to get a slice of the China market and are therefore willing to provide security services to China's dictators. A report said Cisco has made a killing out of cooperation with the Ministry of State Security and the People's Liberation Army.

Seeing only short-term gain, some business people lose sight of the big picture and ignore the interests of their countries. This seems to be the case in all countries. With straight faces, they give all kinds of justifications for their behavior. But their gains are temporary.

If foreign companies really want to make money in China, they should take heed of China's democratization and economic liberalization. Only when they do so will foreign firms develop their business in a fair environment and in compliance with fair legal regulations. Only by so doing will they minimize their trading costs -- especially invisible costs, such as those incurred because of loopholes in the legal system, flip-flopping policies, the impact of personnel changes on the guanxi network and the impact of social instability on the general business environment.

Christian Murck, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, complained recently that China has not made good on many of the pledges it made to gain WTO entry, including lifting restrictions on meat imports and on foreign banks. Capitol Hill's US-China Commission held a public hearing in June on whether China would be able to implement its WTO entry pledges. Neither the government nor the private sector was optimistic about the prospects.

In the face of China's best efforts to keep them down, China's resource-poor dissidents are trying their best to break the Internet blockade. For the sake of its own security, Taiwan needs to maintain its guard and establish countermeasures against a possible Chinese high-tech war.

Taiwan is in the middle of an economic transformation and needs to raise the quality of its high-tech products by a large margin. This will not only be good for economic development, but will also strengthen the nation's electronic warfare capabilities. If Taiwan can develop new technologies to breach China's information blockade, that will also be a contribution to China's democratization.

Paul Lin is a political commentator based in New York.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/09/26/story/0000169535