Censorship on Tiananmen Anniversary Cripples Chinese Net

Submitted by MacRonin on June 4, 2009 - 3:08pm

Censorship on Tiananmen Anniversary Cripples Chinese Net: Via Threat Level.

WASHINGTON — June 4 isn’t just the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, it’s also known as Chinese Internet Maintenance day.

That’s because many Chinese services are facing so much pressure from the government to keep their users from talking about that bloody day, they are just shutting down comment boards, or claiming their services are closed for unspecified upgrades.

For instance, FanFou.com, a popular Twitter-like service, shut its doors for the week, and says it will re-open on June 6.

Meanwhile, the so-called Great Firewall of China is blocking Twitter, human rights groups’ websites and blogging services hosted outside of China.

At a well-timed panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Hu Yong, a popular Chinese blogger and an associate professor at Peking University, quoted EFF co-founder John Gilmore’s famous saying that the “internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

“If he lived in China, he could not say this,” Hu said.

The self-censorship by Chinese companies and even citizens means that techie solutions for getting around the Chinese Firewall won’t work, even for those Chinese net users sophisticated enough to use a proxy or Tor, according to fellow panelist Rebecca MacKinnon, the co-founder of Global Voices.

MacKinnon showed a photo from Ai Wei Wei, a now-famous architect who designed China’s Olympic stadium, who has become a prominent government critic. The photo showed Ai giving the finger to the famous square in Beijing. The post was quickly taken down by the hosting service, but MacKinnon’s Google Reader feed saved a copy from the memory hole.

Despite that censorship, the country is still very interested in the events of 20 years ago, when the government crushed an unprecedented pro-democracy protest in Beijing by unleashing the army on unarmed students.

MacKinnon, the former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN, noted that the top three hot queries on Google.cn were about the anniversary, despite Google’s willing censorship of search results.

But Google does better than the Chinese-owned Baidu search engine, which reports no results for an image search for “Tiananmen Square.” Baidu’s blogging service also searches draft posts for keywords, and forbids publication of posts with controversial terms.

Shen Tong, an internet entrepreneur who has lived in exile since he was a student leader at Tiananmen, says the Chinese government has been quite effective in its selective use and censorship of the internet, noting that it has been very successful in using it to promote economic development and nationalism.

“China is arguably the most serious government in the world about using the internet,” Tong said, noting that the ruling Communist party is particularly skilled at using the web to spread the government line. “So far the Chinese government is getting fairly good results for their purpose. And when the popular opinion is in their favor, the wall comes down.”

And while he agrees that the internet is a liberalizing force, he says China really has an intranet — like AOL in the early ’90s — and that “China is still a police state.”

Michael Anti, the pen name of a popular Chinese blogger who was censored by Microsoft’s MSN Spaces service in 2005, argues that the internet will inevitably liberalize the Chinese people.

“The internet can give the world a good China instead of a bad China,” Anti said. “As time goes by the whole country will become netizens that embrace free speech.”

And, perhaps surprisingly, Anti credits Google with making a serious difference in the lives of Chinese internet users. In China, the search giant is more than just “not evil”; it’s become a powerful force for good.

That’s because Google’s recent move to enable use of the encrypted “https” protocol as a setting on Gmail and Google docs has empowered Chinese citizens to easily share information away from the prying eyes of the government, according to Anti, who was a Harvard Nieman fellow in 2008.

“Civil society in China is based on Google, because Google makes us safe,” Anti said. “MSN and Google are not bad companies, but Yahoo is.” In 2007, Yahoo’s compliance with a Chinese government demand for information led to the arrest and imprisonment of a dissident internet journalist.

Despite the pervasive government censorship, the Chinese internet is full of flame wars, government officials engaging in live chat with citizens, and even sanctioned discussion of controversial government policies, such as the one-child limitation, according to MacKinnon.

Unfortunately, many topics must be discussed in coded language.

“It’s hard to talk about censorship because the word for censorship gets censored,” MacKinnon said.

Instead, activists use words that sound like the banned words, so river crabs wearing three watches has come — by accident of a tonal language — to stand for censorious government officials. So just today, someone posted a picture that showed a river crab capturing a gag-and-muzzled small blue bird — a clear reference for those in the know to the blocking of Twitter.

“There is an outlet now that people can use to protest without going onto the street, but when you try to use the internet to organize, you still go to jail,” MacKinnon said.

But that seemed not to be the case in Hong Kong Thursday, as a reported 150,000 attended a pro-democracy protest.

News of the anniversary protest made its way to the panelists, who took turns passing their smartphones to each other and smiling, eventually telling the crowd they were following Twitters from Chinese citizens who were reporting on the protest in real time.

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