Prior to Xi Jinping, Chinese citizens were using the internet as a more active political platform. However, the nation now boasts the most advanced and extensive web censorship programme in the world. Through Elizabeth C. Economy
Thousands of IT entrepreneurs, experts, and a few heads of state from across the world convened in Wuzhen, southern China, in December 2015 for the nation’s second World Internet Conference. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, outlined his goals for the development of the Chinese internet during the opening ceremony. Xi warned against outside meddling “in other nations’ domestic affairs,” saying that we should support each country’s freedom to independently determine their own course for cyber-development.
Nothing they heard caught anyone off guard. The Chinese internet would be a universe unto itself, with its material strictly regulated and overseen by the Communist party, as Xi had previously created. The Chinese government has increased its investment in policing online material in recent years. The amount of posts on the Chinese blogging site Sina Weibo, which is comparable to Twitter, has dropped dramatically as a result of government measures, and many of China’s most influential voices in favour of reform and internet freedom have been silenced.
This wasn’t always the case. The internet has started to provide the Chinese people an unprecedented amount of openness and capacity to interact in the years prior to Xi taking office in 2012. Popular bloggers attracted tens of millions of followers, some of whom supported radical social and political reforms. Virtual private networks (VPNs) were utilised by Chinese individuals to access banned websites.
Online groups of people organised actual protests and virtual petitions to demand that the government answer for its conduct. In 2010, a study of 300 Chinese officials found that 70% of them were concerned about errors or personal information being posted online. Almost 6,000 Chinese individuals were also polled, and 88 percent of them agreed that officials should be anxious.
The actual world and the virtual world, however, should both represent the same political norms, principles, and values in Xi Jinping’s opinion. The government has made investments in technology advancements to monitor and filter information in order to achieve this. It has enacted new regulations about appropriate material and harshly penalised those who disregard them. Foreign content providers have observed a reduction in their access to China under Xi. Both Xi’s ideological campaign and his ambition for Chinese enterprises to rule the nation’s quickly expanding internet economy are driving them out.
At home, Xi portrays the western version of the internet, which places a premium on information freedom, as being antithetical to Chinese government principles. He defends China’s sovereign right to decide what is damaging stuff outside. Xi is attempting to make his idea of a “Chinanet” (to use blogger Michael Anti’s term) into a model for other nations rather than admitting that attempts to regulate the internet are embarrassing and an indication of future authoritarian weakness.
China’s leadership has a problem in maintaining what it sees as the internet’s advantages – boosting trade and innovation – without allowing technology to hasten political upheaval. Xi appears prepared to bear the sacrifices in terms of economic advancement, artistic expression, public trust in the government, and the growth of civil society in order to preserve his “Chinanet.” However, the internet is still a useful instrument for people who want to promote human rights and social progress. There are far more mice than cats as the game of cat and mouse continues.
In September 1987, 16 years after Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in the US, the first email was transmitted in China. “Across the Great Wall, we can reach every part of the world,” it declared in a triumphant tone. The government first restricted access to the internet to officials and academics. The public was thereafter allowed access in 1995. Although there were only approximately 150,000 internet users in China in 1996, the government declared it to be the “Year of the Internet,” and internet clubs and cafes sprung up all over the country’s biggest cities.
But despite the government’s strong support for the internet, it also took action to regulate it. “As the internet became a publicly available information and communication platform, there was no argument about whether it should fall under official oversight – just about how such control would be executed in practise,” writes Rogier Creemers, an expert on China at Oxford University. Beijing has already passed its first rules outlawing internet comments that it considered to be intended to undermine national security or state interests by 1997.
China’s authorities have good reason to be concerned. The political power of the internet became rapidly apparent to its citizenry. A 30-year-old software programmer named Lin Hai transmitted 30,000 Chinese email addresses to a pro-democracy publication located in the US in 1998. In the first known prosecution in the nation for a political offence committed entirely online, Lin was detained, charged, and finally convicted.
The spiritual group Falun Gong organised a silent demonstration of China over 10,000 supporters outside the Zhongnanhai headquarters complex the next year to protest their inability to practise freely. They did this via email and mobile phones. The event, which was organised without the government’s knowledge, sparked both a renewed desire to regulate the internet and the continuous persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.
Fang Binxing was chosen to head the government’s technical initiatives. The “Golden Shield,” a revolutionary piece of software that allowed the government to analyse any data being received or sent and to block destination IP addresses and domain names, was created by Fang in the late 1990s. His efforts were rewarded with a quick political ascent. He had acquired the title “Father of the Great Firewall” by the 2000s and, eventually, the hatred of hundreds of thousands of Chinese online users.
The Chinese government added new controls to Fang’s technology during the early 2000s in order to make sure that anybody having access to China’s internet followed Chinese laws. The State Council issued Order No. 292 in September 2000, requiring providers of internet services to make sure that the information transmitted through their services complied with the law and that some domain names and IP addresses were logged. Beijing began to ban Google for the first time two years later. (Google launched Google.cn, a filtered version of the website, a few years later.) With the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for China’s Internet Industry, which defined four principles—patriotic adherence of law, equity, trustworthiness, and honesty—the government strengthened its emphasis on self-censorship in 2002. Yahoo! was one of more than 100 businesses to sign the commitment.
The most important change, though, was probably a 2004 internet censorship policy directive that instructed Chinese institutions to hire internet commentators who could steer online debates in politically acceptable ways and flag remarks that violated Chinese law. These commenters were dubbed the “50-cent party,” or wu mao dang, after the little compensation they were allegedly given for each post.
Nevertheless, many citizens were making considerable gains into the country’s political realm, and their main target was dishonest local officials, even as the government worked to restrict people’s access to information.
Deng Yujiao, a young lady employed by a hotel in the Hubei province, fatally stabbed a party official in May 2009 after she refused his advances for paying for sexual favours and he attempted to rape her. Deng was first admitted by police to a mental health facility. Wu Gan, a well-known blogger, however, made her case public. Wu created a blog post detailing the incidents and the activities of the party leaders concerned using data acquired through a technique known as ren rou sousuo, or “human flesh search engine,” in which online users collaborate to find out the identification of a certain person or organisation.
“The cultural relevance of flesh searches is this: in an undemocratic society, the people have limited ways to receive information… [but] citizens may have access to information through the internet, exposing lies and the truth,” he said in an interview with the Atlantic magazine at the time. Young people gathered in Beijing with signs stating “Anyone might be Deng Yujiao” as the public began to support Deng’s case. The court ultimately decided that Deng had acted in self-defense.
The internet was becoming increasingly effective at this time, which was the final year of Hu Jintao’s presidency, as a tool for Chinese citizens to hold their leaders accountable. Most cases were handled locally, much as the one involving Deng Yujiao. However, just a few made it to Beijing’s senior authority. At least 40 people were killed and 172 others were wounded when a high-speed train derailed in the seaside city of Wenzhou on July 23, 2011. Following the incident, Chinese authorities forbade media from conducting investigations and instructed them to only utilise data that had been “provided by authorities.” However, instead of having the debris analysed for evidence, locals snapped pictures of it being buried. The photographs went viral, which strengthened the perception that the government’s primary objective was not to identify the real reason for the disaster.
Users were asked in a later-blocked Sina Weibo poll why they felt the train wreckage was buried, and 98 percent (61,382) said it was because the evidence was being destroyed. Online dark humour: “How far are we from heaven? “The Ministry of Railways fervently asks that you board the Heavenly Party Express,” and “Only a train ticket away.” Due to public pressure, the government launched a thorough inquiry into the incident, and in late December, it released a report placing the blame on inadequate safety precautions and badly built signal equipment. The collision resulted in disciplinary action for up to 54 authorities.
Chinese residents, who often lacked strong civil-society organisations, also found a new feeling of community thanks to the internet. Devastating floods in Beijing in July 2012 forced the evacuation of more than 65,000 citizens and resulted in at least 77 fatalities. A $1.9 billion estimate was made for damages. The early warning system did not function, and it is claimed that police officers continued to penalise stranded automobiles rather than helping locals. The incredible outpouring of support from Beijing online users, who offered their houses and food to stranded individuals, was the actual story, though. An estimated 8.8 million posts on the flooding were posted on Weibo in just 24 hours. The flood tale expanded to include examples of how an online community may become a real one as well as government inefficiency.
China’s leadership started to get a taste for the new capabilities the internet offered, such as a greater knowledge of citizens’ problems and new methods to sway public opinion, while the Chinese people discovered new uses for it. The leadership began to worry that the internet would be used to organise a significant political protest that could pose a danger to the regime as it became a more popular platform for dissent. The government’s response was a steady stream of technical improvements and political instructions, but the limits of digital life kept expanding.
With the election of Xi Jinping in 2012, there was a renewed commitment to do more than just enact laws and delete tweets. Beijing wants to make sure that online material more aggressively promoted Communist party goals. The party took action to stifle dissident voices in both the virtual and physical worlds, mobilise party members in favour of its ideals, and stop the infiltration of foreign ideologies into Chinese political and social life. Xi expressed a bleak view in a speech that was leaked in August 2013: “The internet has become the principal battlefield for the public opinion conflict.”
Xi embraced the realm of social media early in his presidency. To the satisfaction of Chinese propaganda officers, a Weibo group named Fan Group to Learn from Xi first surfaced in late 2012. (The account’s owner denied it, but many Chinese believed it was run by a member of the government.) Government-affiliated media was able to liveblog Xi’s visit to Hebei, and films on Xi, such as the popular music video How Should I Address You based on his visit to a mountain town, show the government’s growing proficiency in online propaganda.
The government has also created new technologies under Xi that has allowed it to have far more control over the internet. Many of the VPNs that people had been using to get around the Great Firewall had been disabled by the authorities in January 2015. Many foreign observers were surprised by this, as they had assumed that the government wouldn’t crack down on VPNs because they were too beneficial to the Chinese economy – helping global corporations, banks, and stores, among others – to do so.
Beijing fired off the Great Cannon in the spring of 2015. The Great Cannon may alter and replace material as it moves through the internet, in contrast to the Great Firewall, which can stop data as it enters or leaves China. The US coding and software development website GitHub was one of its initial targets. The Chinese government attacked the website with a distributed denial of service attack using the Great Cannon, flooding it with traffic from Baidu (a search engine similar to Google). The attack concentrated on trying to get GitHub to take down sites that were connected to the Chinese-language New York Times and GreatFire.org, a well-known VPN that aids users in getting over Chinese internet restrictions.
However, Xi’s most notable gamble may have been to control the type of internet information that is made available. The “seven baselines” are a new set of rules that the government released in August 2013. Chinese internet businesses responded right away. For instance, Sina “processed” 100,000 Weibo accounts that were discovered to be in violation of the new guidelines.
Additionally, the government imposed severe regulations on online rumours. The supreme people’s court declared in September 2013 that anyone who publish online content that intentionally spreads rumours or falsehoods and is either seen by more than 5,000 people or shared more than 500 times may be charged with defamation and sentenced to up to three years in prison. For instance, following significant floods in Hebei province in July 2016, the authorities imprisoned three people on suspicion of disseminating “fake news” about the number of fatalities and the origin of the flood on social media. Additionally, several social media postings and images of the flooding, notably those of individuals who drowned, were edited.
Additionally, Xi’s administration started focusing on those with substantial social media followings who may undermine the Communist party’s dominance. Beginning in 2013, restrictions on the most well-known Chinese web influencers marked a significant turning point in China’s internet culture. Politics started to fade from the conversation as other casual and less delicate topics emerged. There had a significant influence on Sina Weibo. A survey of 1.6 million Weibo users found that between 2011 and 2013, there were 70% fewer posts on Weibo.
The Communist Party’s determination to stop the dissemination of material that it deems hazardous is what gives it the strongest hold over the internet. Additionally, it has embraced cutting-edge technologies like the Golden Shield and the Great Firewall. The cyber-army it has created to carry out its goals, however, may be its most powerful source of influence.
In 2013, an estimated 2 million employees were paid to track public opinion and regulate online material, a position euphemistically called as “internet public opinion analyst.” They work for news organisations, commercial businesses, and government propaganda units. According to a Harvard research from 2016, the Chinese government publishes and fabricates 448 million comments on social media per year. Manually removing posts is a significant method of censorship, and both the government and commercial corporations employ an estimated 100,000 employees to accomplish this.
Internet filtering in China is significantly facilitated by private firms. Guobin Yang, an expert on the internet, claims that it “may not be too much of a leap to talk about the commercialisation of online content regulation” given how actively commercial internet service providers are involved in policing the websites they host. The fact that a number of influential technology entrepreneurs are also elected officials simplifies the process. For instance, Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of smartphone giant Xiaomi, is a representative of the National People’s Congress, while Robin Li of Baidu is a member of the advisory legislature known as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
However, Xi’s expanding control over the internet is not free. Economic growth is hampered by an inefficient internet or one that places restrictions on access to information. China’s internet is infamously unstable and has the 91st-fastest speed in the world. How many nations have internet connections to the rest of the world in 2015 that are worse than they were in 2014? asks Evan Osnos of the New Yorker in a piece about how the Chinese internet has changed under Xi.
The future of scientific innovation, which the Chinese leadership values highly, may also be in jeopardy. After the VPN crackdown, a Chinese scientist wrote an article with the heading Why Do Scientists Need Google? that quickly gained traction on social media. No matter how much time it wastes, he declared: “If a country wants to force this many scientists to take time away from the brief span of their professional lives to research technology for scaling the Great Firewall and to install and continuously upgrade every kind of software for routers, computers, tablets, and mobile devices.”
The damage to the Chinese leadership’s credibility is more difficult to measure. Puns were used by internet users to make fun of China’s censorship system while criticising the Great Firewall. Some started using the term “wall country” to refer to China, playing off the fact that the words “strong nation” and “wall nation” have the same phonetic sound in Chinese (qiangguo). Those in charge of attempting to regulate material have also been heavily ridiculed. Fang created a Sina Weibo account in December 2010, but he promptly deleted it when tens of thousands of people accused him of being a government hacker in “expletive-laden posts.” The search phrase “Fang Binxing” was prohibited by Sina Weibo censors; a Twitter user commented: “Kind of poetic, actually, the blocker, blocked.” At Wuhan University in central China in 2011, a few students attacked Fang after he gave a speech by throwing eggs and a pair of shoes at him.
However, if it means having more control over the internet, the government is ready to pay the financial and scientific expenses as well as possible harm to its reputation. Beijing’s cyber-policy serves as a warning to the international community about the threat a more strong China poses to the liberal world order, which places a premium on principles like freedom of expression. It also illustrates the paradoxical nature of China’s attempts to portray itself as a proponent of globalisation while at the same time supporting a concept of internet sovereignty and shielding its cyberspace from outside knowledge and investment.
Adapted from Elizabeth C Economy’s The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, available from the Guardian Bookshop and published by Oxford University Press.