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Although China is home to the largest population of internet users in the world and has witnessed increasing creativity and "pushback" from its netizens, the country's internet environment remains one of the most controlled in the world. China's 1.3 billion citizens have only a limited ability to access and circulate information that is vital to their well-being and important to the country's future. The Chinese authorities maintain a sophisticated and multilayered system of mechanisms for censoring, monitoring, and controlling activities on the internet, mobile telephones, and other information and communication technologies (ICTs). Government-imposed obstacles to accessing ICTs are significant, including restricted access to advanced applications, government control over the backbone of the network, and a freeze on the opening of new cybercafes. In recent years, the government has also mounted new attempts to manipulate online discussion, such as recruiting commentators to guide opinions and forcefully encouraging self-discipline among private internet companies and web-hosting services. Perhaps unsurprisingly, China has the world's largest number of individuals imprisoned for their online activities.
The internet was first opened for public access in China in 1996, and the number of users has since grown exponentially, from 20 million in 2001 to over 200 million in 2008. In 2008, China surpassed the United States as home to the largest number of internet users in the world, with the government-linked China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) announcing a total of 298 million users. Broadband access is widespread. Use of mobile telephones has also spread quickly. According to the ITU there were 633 million mobile-phone users in China by the end of 2008, giving the country a penetration rate of nearly 50 percent and the world's largest population of mobile users. Access to the internet via mobile phones has increased in recent years; state-run media reported that 117 million people used this service in 2008, more than double the total from the previous year. The increase in both the overall internet population and the number of mobile internet users may be attributed in part to a gradual decrease in the cost of broadband and mobile-phone access.
Realizing the potential contributions of the internet and other ICTs to economic modernization and growth, the Chinese leadership has encouraged the expansion of the relevant underlying infrastructure. From the beginning, however, the Chinese government sought to assert its authority over the new medium. The underlying system of infrastructural control and filtering technology has been more or less complete since 2003, while more sophisticated forms of content manipulation have gained prominence only recently. In some instances, the government has shut down access to ICTs or applications surrounding specific events. During the summer and fall of 2007, prior to the 17th Party Congress, the authorities carried out a widespread shutdown of data centers housing servers for websites, online bulletin boards, and comment forums, affecting millions of users.
The Current Status of Control
Though Chinese citizens have widespread access to internet technology and applications, such as video-sharing websites, social-networking tools, and email services, extensive restrictions remain, particularly on advanced applications whose providers are based outside the country. The You Tube video-sharing site and overseas blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogspot cannot be reliably accessed in China; the email services Gmail and Hotmail are frequently jammed. The social-networking site Facebook, which is popular among Chinese college students, was periodically blocked during 2008, especially during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. In cases where international applications are available, as with Google search engines and Skype Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the foreign corporations in question have agreed to alter their services and implement monitoring and censorship of political content in order to gain access to the market. For international applications that remain blocked, Chinese equivalents have emerged and gained immense popularity, though they are more susceptible to government control.
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In 2007, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), which oversees audiovisual content on the internet, ordered that all video-sharing websites must be state owned, except for several large examples that had already become influential. SARFT subsequently shut down many video-sharing sites and demanded that the three major ones--Tudou.com, 56.com, and Youku.com--be closed for several days in 2008 to conduct a "self-inspection" and ensure that adequate content controls were in place.
The authorities also exercise fairly tight control over cybercafes, which would otherwise enable anonymous communication and networking among citizens. The issuance of licenses for the establishment of cybercafes is managed by the Ministry of Culture (MC) and its local departments. The ministry has stepped up its regulation of cybercafes in recent years. In 2003, it ordered that the facilities must be operated as chain stores, and since March 2007 it has indefinitely suspended the issuance of new licenses (there were 113,000 cybercafes in existence at the time). Mobile-telephone communication is dominated by three state-owned operators: China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom. Under the oversight of the MIIT, connection to the internet via mobile phones is also monitored by the international gateway operators. Major circumvention websites like anonymizer.com and proxify. com have also been blocked.
China's purported goal with its internet controls is the limitation of pornography, gambling, and other harmful practices, but such content is generally easier to access than information related to political and religious groups, human rights violations, and alternative news sources. In fact, the most frequently and systematically censored topics are those that the Communist Party deems to be the most threatening to its domestic legitimacy. These include criticism of top leaders, independent evaluations of China's rights record, violations of minority rights in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Falun Gong spiritual group, the 1989 Beijing massacre, and various dissident initiatives that challenge the regime on a systemic level, such as the Nine Commentaries (a series of editorials analyzing the history of the party and encouraging an end to its rule) and, more recently, Charter 08 (a prodemocracy manifesto calling for a multiparty system). These standing taboos are supplemented regularly by directives and terms targeting specific, unforeseen incidents and other events on which the government wishes to suppress news or opinions, such as the work of individual human rights defenders, allegations of shoddy construction surrounding the Sichuan earthquake, occurrences related to the Olympics, anti-government riots in various localities, and any references to censorship. Broader politically oriented terms, such as "democracy," "human rights," and "freedom of speech," are subject to less extensive censorship.
Mechanisms of Control
The Communist Party's internet control strategy consists of four distinct techniques: technical filtering, prepublication censorship, postpublication censorship, and proactive manipulation. While the first is primarily aimed at content based outside of China, the latter three apply to content produced and posted within China as well.
In large part, technical filtering relies on restricting access to foreign websites, as enabled by the channeling of all internet traffic through centralized operators that link China to the international internet. The state controls the six to eight state-run operators, located in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. This arrangement is the primary infrastructural limitation on open internet access in the country. Among the websites that are systematically blocked are those of political parties in Taiwan or groups supporting greater freedom for religious and ethnic minorities, human rights organizations, international news outlets, and overseas dissident publications. In 2008, the government's pledges of unfettered internet access for foreign journalists during the Olympics were not upheld. Similarly, while some foreign sites were unblocked for Chinese users before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, most of them were inaccessible again by late 2008. Filtering by keyword is also implemented in instant-messaging services and mobile phone text-messaging.
Chinese authorities enforce prepublication censorship, the second major means of control, using lists of taboo topics that Chinese government bodies, mainly the Information Office of Beijing (or its equivalent in other cities), periodically issue as circumstances require. These are accompanied by specific instructions on how to treat the proscribed topics, such as not placing certain content in an important position on a homepage, not allowing it to appear in blog entries and comment forums, or not reprinting items from foreign news sources. Such orders are expected to be carried out--either automatically or manually--by state-run online news outlets and private companies running a wide variety of websites; the latter risk losing their business licenses if they fail to comply. Most postings on blogs, comment sections of news items, and bulletin board system (BBS) discussions that are deemed objectionable are deleted at this stage. Tests conducted recently found that entries containing sensitive keywords such as "June 4," "Falun Gong," or "Dalai Lama" could not be displayed on Chinese blog hosting services, including the simplified Chinese version of Microsoft's MSN Space Live service and Skype's Chinese version, Tom. A more extensive academic study found that while this practice was common, implementation was nonetheless inconsistent across blog hosting companies, and some potentially sensitive discussions did take place, indicating a tendency among private actors to resist government orders. Also, a system of virtual internet policing in some localities employs the animated characters "Jing Jing" and "Cha Cha" to warn users of online content infringements, an additional form of prepublication censorship.
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