The Times: The great firewall of China

by raymond snoddy

THE OPENING of the Chinese Party Congress today, when power is due to transfer in an orderly way from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, is clearly a huge story for BBCchinese.com, the Chinese language internet service. Raymond Li, the head of the Chinese service, has a producer in Beijing for the great occasion and a second producer is also there for the BBC’s Chinese radio services.

Unfortunately they will be reporting largely for the Chinese diaspora. BBC radio broadcasts in Chinese have been jammed since 1989 by a mixture of “white noise” and the broadcasting of high-power local services on the same frequencies. The Chinese recently went further and started jamming World Service Uzbek programmes because of separatist tendencies by the Uighurs, a Muslim minority group living in northwest China which speaks a language similar to Uzbek.

That’s radio. But the Chinese can’t block the internet, can they? In fact, so far they seem to be doing a very effective job: although naturally such interference is neither officially acknowledged nor totally successful.

Li feels that he is fighting an “electronic war” with the Chinese Government, which is constantly developing new ways of blocking and filtering “unacceptable” internet content.

“Chinese control of the internet is sophisticated. I think it is one of the most flexible countries in the world,” he says. He believes that only 2 per cent of more than two million page impressions a month on BBCchinese get through to mainland China.

Such a level of control means that few Chinese would have been able to read the BBC story that the Chinese Government had asked financial authorities to keep stock prices on an upward trend “to provide a positive atmosphere” during the historic Congress.

Renewed efforts are also being made to ensure that untoward information on websites such as BBCchinese.com does not get through at such a sensitive time.

“In the run-up to the Congress I have been told that the Government has issued even stricter orders than usual,” says Li.

The Chinese have little difficulty in controlling content on web servers within the country, but interrupting the stream of electronic information from around the world is a greater challenge. “They have software which can filter out what they see as harmful content by picking up key words and phrases,” says Li.

The home page of the BBC in English, with basic news and the latest developments on EastEnders, gets through, but BBCchinese does not. Anything with the words “Tibetan independence” or Falun Gong […] will not get through what is called “the great firewall of China”.

Li estimates that as many as 10,000 people could be involved in the government attempt to intercept “harmful” material and believes that the filtering software is now also being used to block e-mails containing suspicious words or from unacceptable addresses.

“We perceive it as a conflicting picture in China. On the one hand their Government is very keen on modernising and on using the internet as a modernising tool. On the other, they are afraid of the potential impact of the internet,” says Li.

This dichotomy leads to some curious events. In September, China’s 46 million internet users were unable to access Google, one of the most popular search engines, for more than two weeks. Then, equally mysteriously, it was restored - perhaps after protests from Chinese specialists who use the Google Chinese service for research, although the server may still be subject to filtering.

Li says that Chinese internet users get around any restrictions and reach BBCchinese by using “proxy servers”, many of them based in Taiwan. These are third-party servers which happen to carry information from other websites such as the BBC.

I was told by a computer expert in China that the most popular phrase on search engines in China is “proxy server”,” says Li. “It used to take months for the Government to block a proxy server but now it can happen in days.”

The BBC editor does not expect the cat-and-mouse game to end any time soon, and it is a game he doesn’t enjoy. “I am frustrated, but what can I do?” he says. “They (the Communists) believe that the media is so important in motivating and changing people’s minds.”

In the aftermath of the People’s Congress, he adds, stability will certainly be the watchword: “There must be a fundamental change in Chinese politics and society before there will be a liberalisation.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-472616,00.html