This is an excerpt from a long article in Wired Magazine all the way back in 1997 when China started building the massive firewall or 'Net Wall'. I've also posted an excerpt from a follow up article on the current state of the Net Wall and the resulting censorship. I'm posting it because of all the back and forth arguing in the Tibet/ Tiananmen Square threads regarding press, Internet freedom, and propaganda. A question for example ~ can a citizen in China come to Clutchfans without a proxy or code words and discuss Tibet or other issues considered sensitive by the PRC? _____ It would be easy enough in China to radically limit the Net's spread. But companies like China InfoHighway have a more focused agenda: turning information technology to their own, avowedly chauvinistic, advantage. It's not official policy, but it's close. And it certainly reflects the attitude of thinly disguised nationalist grievance that informs so much of China's current relations - the debates over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet, for starters - with the rest of the world. _____ The Great Firewall of China ... In an equipment-crowded office in the Air Force Guesthouse on Beijing's Third Ring Road sits the man in charge of computer and Net surveillance at the Public Security Bureau. The PSB - leizi, or "thunder makers," in local dialect - covers not only robberies and murder, but also cultural espionage, "spiritual pollutants," and all manner of dissent. Its new concern is Internet malfeasance. A computer engineer in his late 30s, Comrade X (he asked not to be identified because of his less-than-polite comments about some Chinese ISPs) is overseeing efforts to build a digital equivalent to China's Great Wall. Under construction since last year, what's officially known as the "firewall" is designed to keep Chinese cyberspace free of pollutants of all sorts, by the simple means of requiring ISPs to block access to "problem" sites abroad. Comrade X explains: "The first line of defense is what we call 'preventative interference,' based on selected keywords. What we're particularly concerned about is material aimed at undermining the unity and sovereignty of China (that is, references to Tibetan independence and the Taiwan question), attempts to propagate new religions like the Children of God, and dissident publications. Commonplace ideological differences of opinion are now generally ignored." People are used to being wary, and the general sense that you are under surveillance acts as a disincentive. The key to controlling the Net in China is in managing people, and this is a process that begins the moment you purchase a modem. wired _____ "WE DON'T TOUCH POLITICS." The Great Firewall of China ... It's no secret that Western Internet companies have to hew to the party line if they want to do business in China. Google, Yahoo!, and scores of other outfits, both domestic and foreign, have made concessions to China's censors. The latest high-profile example: In December, Microsoft's MSN shut down a Chinese blogger's site at the government's request. How do the Chinese do it? Beijing has a vast infrastructure of technology to keep an eye on any potential online dissent. It also applies lots of human eyeballs to monitoring. The agencies that watch over the Net employ more than 30,000 people to prowl Web sites, blogs, and chat rooms on the lookout for offensive content as well as scammers. In the U.S., by contrast, the entire CIA employs an estimated 16,000 people. For those who can't see the characters on the wall, Beijing has plenty of backup. All Internet traffic entering or leaving China must pass through government-controlled gateways -- that is, banks of computers -- where e-mail and Web-site requests are monitored. E-mail with offending words such as "Taiwan independence" or "democracy" can be pulled aside and trashed. And when a mainland user tries to open a page that's blacklisted, the gateway will simply deny access. Search for "Tiananmen Massacre" in China, for example, and 90 of the top 100 sites that mention it are blocked, according to the OpenNet Initiative, an Internet watchdog group. The Net operators' response? "We are trying to provide as much information as possible," says Robin Li, chairman of Baidu.com (BIDU), China's top search engine. "But we need to obey Chinese law." The restrictions have led many companies to make both subtle and substantial changes to their operations on the mainland. The Shanghai podcasting and video blogging service provider Toodou.com checks files before they're posted, and users sometimes report objectionable content. And IDG Venture Technology Investment, part of Boston's International Data Group, has invested in a Chinese company that operates online bulletin boards on real estate, entertainment, technology, autos, and more. But "we don't touch politics at all," says Quan Zhou, managing director of the group's Chinese arm. Business Week
"Hello, son. How was your day at work?" "Oh, I just kind of surfed the web all day, posted some pictures of Yao Ming in practice."
you know what? should chinese government not restrain its publicizing the tibet event inside china, there would have been lots of civil demonstrations in condemnation of Tibet seperists and foreign meddlers
i doubt they have enough people to monitor all the traffic. i was there a few months ago and i was able to check this forum anytime i wanted.
One of the most obvious effects of Chinese internet censorship on the population is the glaring misuse of emoticons on BBS forums when they are finally free to post.
What's the point? p*rn never has anything bad to say about the government. I personally think it's not as bad as some people make it out to be, but also quite inconvinient in other regards. Basically, as long as you stay away from the political stuff, they don't really care. It's not as if you say "Mao sucks" secret agents will take you out of your home and banish you to the desert. Proxy servers and VPN pretty much makes banned internet pages somewhat manageable. However, China recently ban included YOUTUBE!!!!! That pissed me off big time. I actually didn't care much about the government interference of the internet until this happened.
Read some BBC article There also seemed to be an ambivalent attitude to p*rn on the net. The researchers found that China blocked just 13.4% of their sample of well-known sexually explicit sites. "Blocking of such sites as Playboy and Penthouse suggests a purposeful decision to restrict sexually explicit material," said the researchers. "Yet the well-known sites of Hustler Magazine and whitehouse.com were consistently accessible." So they do censor some!
*Types in www.playboy.com and www.penthouse.com on the computer. Then quickly close the sites because meh's at work.* Seems to me that either the Chinese govt. lifted those bans, or BBC is full of crap.
It was an article from December, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2540309.stm Just googled it randomly.
If the article is that old, then the government must have lifted the ban since then. My personal feeling is that the government only cares about projecting a positive image on themselves to the people. So anything remotely negative sites against the Chinese government is fair game for censorship. Otherwise, they really could care less. So like I said, p*rn never said anything bad about the government.
This is from 2007 [rquoter] China launches campaign to crack down on Web p*rn BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Ministry of Public Security (MPS), along with nine other government departments, announced the launching of a campaign here Thursday to restrict the spread of p*rnography on the Internet in China. "The boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds." said Zhang Xinfeng, vice minister of MPS. In the next six months, Zhang said, the ministries will crack down on illegal on-line activities such as distributing pornographic materials and organizing cyber strip shows, and purge the web of sexually-explicit images, stories, and audio and video clips. The campaign will also target on illegal on-line lotteries and contraband trade, fraud, and "content that spreads rumors and is of a slanderous nature", said Zhang. In Nov. 2006, Chinese police cracked the largest pornographic website in the country and arrested the creator Chen Hui, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment. The website Chen started contained more than nine million pornographic images and articles and it had attracted more than 600,000 registered users. "The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace," Zhang said. China has roughly 123 million Internet users, most of whom are young people. The Chinese government believes they need to be protected from negative on-line influences. A report by the Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents said 33.5 percent of its detainees were influenced by violent on-line games or erotic websites when they committed crimes such as robbery and rape. [/rquoter]
