February 4:

“Wang Lijun” (王立军): “Wang Lijun” was found to be unblocked during a re-test on February 8.

February 7:

“Political asylum” (政治庇护): Wang is rumored to have sought political asylum in the U.S. Consulate at Chengdu.

“U.S. Consulate” (美领馆): Found unblocked in a February 8 re-test.

February 8:

“Pingxi Wang” (平西王, which literally means “King Who Pacifies the West”): Pingxi Wang is a title that Wu Sangui, a military general during late Ming Dynasty, was rewarded after he betrayed his country. It’s also a popular online nickname for Bo Xilai.

“Governor Bo”(薄督): Another alias for Bo Xilai.

“Lai Junchen” (来俊臣): A secret police official during Tang Dynasty; netizens often refer to Wang as Lai Junchen because of their similarity.

“U.S. Consulate at Chengdu” (成都美领馆)

Note: CDT Chinese has launched a project to crowd-source filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information.

© fionasmith for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet censorship, sensitive words, Wang Lijun
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- A female colleague just came back from a blind date. She is quite excited. She said to me, this man is quite accomplished. He is just over thirty and is already the Chief Manager of the China Office of the Facebook. I said to her: grab him, don’t miss this one.

Following are some of the comments under this post:

- We are in the same business then. I am the CEO of the China office of Youtube*.

- I won’t tell you that I am the chief representative of the China office of Twitter*.

- I am exactly 30 this year. My father is the Commander-in-Chief of Mongolia’s Navy.

- Facebook’s prospectus has listed four countries which limited their citizens to visit their website: Syria, Iran, China, and North Korea. These are what in history books will be called the “four ancient civilizations.”

- The acronym [of the "four ancient civilizations"] is SICK.

- The sin of Facebook is that it lets people meet whom they want to meet. The sin of Twitter is that it lets people say what they want to say. The sin of Google is that it lets people know what they want to know. The sin of YouTube is that it lets people show the reality which needs to be shown. Almost all the world’s top ten websites are blocked in China. Why do we want to be the enemy of those technologies that have changed the world?

* [YouTube and Twitter are also blocked inside China]

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Internet censorship, jokes, Twitter
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China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions — still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”

Fortunately for the government, there are plenty of social networking platforms and other delightfully entertaining and useful services on the Chinese Internet to keep people occupied, without much need to access sites and services based overseas — assuming they have no interest in politics, religion or human rights issues. Baidu, the homegrown search engine, enables people to locate all the content on the Chinese-language Internet that their government permits. The social networking platforms RenRen and Kaixinwang substitute for Facebook. People can blog on platforms run by Chinese companies like Sohu and Sina, which also runs a wildly popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo. QQ, run by the company Tencent, offers instant messaging, gaming and all kinds of interactive services that work seamlessly across both PCs and mobile phones.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Great Firewall, Internet censorship, IT industry, online culture
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China, infamous for its methods of controlling online activity and guiding online opinion, has served as ammunition in the battle against SOPA/PIPA. Commentators the world over are pointing to it as an example of the future that SOPA and PIPA might usher in. In a Global Voices post, Weiping Li translates some comments from Mainland China and Taiwan:

“Now they’re copying us to build up a wall. It’s like after climbing over the wall, we then bump into another one. It’s crazy!! (現在等於他們自己也照著我們這樣造個牆，於是我們以後翻牆出去，又被他們的牆牆住[，]這簡直瘋了嗎！)”

On China’s Sina Weibo microblogging service a Chinese Internet user with nickname “gap foreseeable (落差可見)” expresses concern over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which expected to [be] brought to a vote in U.S. House of Representatives before the end of the year. The Chinese government has long been criticized by Americans for obstructing the free flow of information through a filtering system popularly known as the Great Firewall. Now it is Chinese neitzens’ turn to sneer at proposals for a Made-in-America Great Firewall.

An article at Wired.com, one of the websites involved in the blackout campaign, also likens these bills to the situation in China:

We’ve blacked out the headlines on our website homepage today as part of a global internet protest against two radical anti-piracy bills pending in Congress — legislation that threatens to usher in a chilling internet censorship regime here in the U.S. comparable in some ways to China’s “Great Firewall.”

The Dyn.com page explaining why they oppose SOPA also uses the Great Firewall as a warning:

Are you familiar with the Great Firewall Of China? Sometimes referred to as the Golden Shield project, it’s a Chinese government censorship and Internet surveillance project kicked off in 1998 and put into action in 2003. Simply put, it enables the government to restrict what content its citizens can read and view via IP blocking and DNS filtering. If they don’t like a site request a user makes, it won’t get viewed.

Many dismiss what’s happening in China and chalk to up to their communist political system. That could never happen in a free speech-driven, rights for all society like we have in the United States, right?

If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) introduced this week gets enacted into law, things could change negatively for Americans which is why Dyn opposes the bill.

But is the Great Firewall an accurate parallel to draw in the campaign against these bills? In a sobering blogpost for Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish points to today’s blackout campaign itself to illustrate the disconnect in using China to warn of the future:

American websites have the right to protest and protect their content because they exist in a country that respect the rule of law. America couldn’t create a “Great Firewall” comparable to China’s, because it wouldn’t be backed by a Chinese-style system where the Communist Party hovers above the law. Comparing the Chinese and American internet is akin to saying that a kitten that scratches furniture and a lion that eats people are both members of the cat family. True, yes, but it completely misses the point.

Update: Echoing comments made by Foreign Policy Isaac Stone Fish, The Los Angeles Times notes that bloggers in China scoff at comparisons between SOPA/PIPA and the Chinese web censorship regime:

“Only an American company could protest the way Wikipedia or Google has to the government,” said Zhao Jing, a closely followed blogger in Beijing who uses the pen name Michael Anti. “A Chinese company would never get away with that.”

Indeed, China’s Internet sector has no choice but to submit to government pressure -– be it by censoring its own users or implementing whatever happens to be the state initiative of the moment (the latest may require the real-ID registration of 250 million micro-blog accounts despite threats to privacy and the cost burden on Web firms).

Another distinction Chinese activists note is that the proposed legislation in Washington is being debated openly in public and ultimately has to adhere to U.S. law. Chinese censorship, on the other hand, operates in an opaque space where no one really knows what’s banned, what isn’t and who is calling the shots.

Similarly, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos highlights the discussion that has emerged on the Chinese Internet:

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.

There was little expectation that Chinese Web sites would ever band together to express their opposition to censorship: “Baidu, would you dare do something like this?” one asked.

The most eloquent response to the controversy, perhaps, was one that nobody saw at all. Commentator Shi Han wrote about trying to post a comment to Tencent, the giant Chinese portal. “I’ve written a short article about SOPA. But when I tried to put it up, Tencent replied with a message: ‘Your content has not passed review.’”

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activism, censorship, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Pipa, protest, SOPA
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A lengthy summary of the Tsinghua University report was published in the January 9 edition of China Youth Daily, and was quickly posted to a number of major Chinese web portals, including People’s Daily Online. But within hours, links to the article were disabled.

By mid-day the link to the China Youth Daily version at People’s Daily Online called up a warning page that read: “The page you are looking for does not exist. You will be automatically re-directed to the People’s Daily Online homepage in 5 seconds.” A similar warning from the popular Netease web portal read: “We’re sorry, the page you are visiting does not exist or has already been deleted.”

For several hours, users on the popular social media platform Sina Weibo shared a link to a cached version of the China Youth Daily report at Baidu.com, as well as news that the article had been deleted from sites like Netease. By day’s end the Baidu version had been pulled down as well. The page now linked only to the electronic edition of China Youth Daily, where an unreadable image of the original newspaper page could be found but the text to the right only read: “This article has been deleted.”

CMP also translates the China Daily summary of the report.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet censorship, political reform
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Below is a list of Wukan-related banned search terms originally found and tested by CDT staff on December 14, 2011:

“Wukan” (乌坎) [Wukan in simplified Chinese], “Wukan”, “raven rugged” (乌鸦 坎坷) [these two irrelevant phrases consist Chinese characters “Wu” (乌) and “Kan” (坎), which have been used by many netizens to get around censorship], “Lufeng” (陆丰) [Wukan is part of Lufeng, a county-level city in Shangwei], “Shangwei” (汕尾) [a prefectural-level city in Guangdong Province], “Party secretary” (党委书记) [Xue Chang (薛昌), the Party secretary who governed Wukan for three decades, is believed to be responsible for selling off villagers’ land to a developer], “9.21” [Wukan protests are referred as “the  September 21 Wukan Mass Incident” by state media], “Xue Jinbo” (薛锦波) [a village leader who died in police custody], “Amnesty International” (国际特赦) [AI demanded an immediate independent investigation into Xue Jinbo’s death. Interestingly, another common Chinese translation of AI (大赦国际) is not banned], “sudden death” (猝死) [Authorities claimed that Xue Jinbo’s death was due to cardiac failure (心源性猝死), “cardiogenic sudden death” in Chinese], “Zhuang Liehong” (庄烈宏) [one of the four Wukan villagers detained by the local police], “attack*” (袭击), “confrontation*” (对峙).

On December 19, one new banned search term was uncovered during a re-test, while some of the terms listed above were found to be unblocked.

The new keyword was “WK,” a simple two-letter abbreviation of “Wukan.” Many netizens have been using “WK” to get around censorship after finding that “Wukan” became a banned keyword on China’s largest search engine, Baidu, as well as on Sina Weibo.

Surprisingly, the following keywords were found to be unblocked on Sina Weibo search during a re-test on the 19th:

“Wukan”, “raven rugged” (乌鸦 坎坷), “Shangwei” (汕尾), “9.21”, “sudden death” (猝死), “Xue Jinbo” (薛锦波), “Zhuang Liehong” (庄烈宏).

On December 21, soon after Wukan villagers were reported to have postponed their protest march, three more crucial keywords were found to be unblocked:

“WK”, “Wukan” (乌坎), “Lufeng” (陆丰)

We will keep updating the keyword list as the negotiation between Wukan villagers and local government continues.

Update: “Wukan” (乌坎) [Wukan in simplified Chinese] appears to be banned again on Sina Weibo search function during a re-test conducted by CDT staff on December 22, 2011.

A new Wukan-related banned search term, “Zheng Yanxiong” (郑雁雄), was uncovered by CDT staff earlier today. But it was found unblocked again just a few hours later during a re-test. Zheng is the Municipal Committee Secretary of Shangwei. A video clip of him criticizing the Wukan protests on a conference has been circulating over the internet since December 20, 2011.

* “Attack” and “confrontation” were unblocked until December 19, but they may not necessarily be directly related to Sina Weibo’s response to Wukan protests.

Note: CDT Chinese has launched a project to crowd-source filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them (using simplified characters), but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information.

© sandra for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet censorship, land, land grabs, sinaweibo, weibo, Wukan, Xue Jinbo
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The pair, arrested in the city of Changsha Sunday, were accused of spreading a rumor that 5,000 policemen and 100 police vehicles were seen guarding a wedding convoy in the city on Dec. 6, police investigators said.

The two men, both in their twenties, posted a video clip online showing crowds of police officers and a wedding convoy on the street. Police investigators said the incident was a coincidence, as the officers were returning from a training drill and happened to be passing the convoy at that particular moment.

Local police officials said the rumor spread quickly, with the video clip receiving large numbers of hits. The two men will be detained for a total of five days in accordance with relevant laws, the officials said.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal noted a “state-media anti-Internet rumor blitz” as the latest development in Beijing’s battle for control of the Internet, a campaign which includes editorials comparing the dangers of the web to drugs, prostitution and gambling:

“Internet rumors are highly destructive and harmful,” said a piece that was published on Nov. 28 on the People’s Daily website. “It is widely acknowledged that drugs could make people addicted, anaesthetize their nerves, and mess up their physical functions, which will further destroy family units, disturb society as a whole and trigger crime.”

“Doesn’t this mean that Internet rumors are a type of malignant tumor which harms the Internet’s image while eroding social values?” it said, adding that the government would take a “zero tolerance” attitude toward rumors.

Xinhua Online ran the first in a series of commentaries on the subject on the same day, saying Internet rumors are “highly poisonous” – worse, even, than heroin and cocaine. They are “just like beautiful poppy flowers, which are always under pretty disguise, and make people deeply poisoned.”

In addition to cracking down on rumors, the Chinese government has also targeted pornography and vulgarity as it seeks ways to rein in the influence and freedoms of microblogging platforms such as Sina Weibo. Last week, the State Information Office reported that 206 more microblog accounts were shutdown for distributing crude content. The latest campaign also has sought to reform the registration requirements on microblogs – Last week, China Daily reported that Sina Weibo has set up a system to verify the identities of its users:

Micro-bloggers can now go to the site and voluntarily submit their names, ID numbers and their cell phone numbers. Sina Weibo will then have public security departments check that information for accuracy, Mao Taotao, a public relations manager at Sina, said on Friday.

He said micro-bloggers whose ID numbers jibe with police records will receive an “honor medal”, which will be displayed under their user names on the website.

“We are encouraging micro-bloggers to apply for the real-name system, but we don’t expect all users to do that,” he said.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet censorship, Internet crackdown, Internet regulation, microblogs, online public opinion, rumors, sina weibo
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In the cat-and-mouse game between Chinese censors and Internet users, the government seems to be testing a new mousetrap–one that may be designed to detect and block tunnels through its Great Firewall even when the data in those tunnels is aimed at a little-known computer and obscured by encryption.

In recent months, administrators of services with encrypted connections designed to allow users secure remote access say they’ve seen strange activity coming from China: When a user from within the country attempts to reach a server abroad, a string of seemingly random data hits the destination computer before he or she can connect, sometimes followed by that user’s communication being mysteriously dropped.

The anti-censorship and anonymity service Tor, for instance, has found that many of its “bridge nodes”–privately-placed servers around the world designed to connect users to the rest of Tor’s public network of traffic re-routing computers–have become inaccessible to Chinese users within hours or even minutes of being set up, according to Andrew Lewman, the project’s executive director. Users have told him that other censorship circumvention services like Ultrasurf and Freegate have seen similar problems, he says. “Someone will try to connect, then there’s a weird scan, and the bridge stops working,” says Lewman. “We see weird things all the time, but this is a semi-consistent weird thing, and it’s only coming from China.”

Also related, the so-called Father of the Great Firewall, Fang Binxing, recently gave a speech on “the future of Internet security” in which he emphasized the need for Internet sovereignty. Translated by Global Voices:

In his conclusion, he put forward the need for ensuring China’s Internet Sovereignty and there are four principles for enhancing such sovereignty:

1. Independency – Against foreign intervention of the network. The government can negotiate for unilateral or multinational agreement for network access.
2. Equality – Against monopoly of giant ISPs such as Sprint and the so-called global principle in Internet governance.
3. Self-Defense – In order to self-defense, a sovereignty should have the rights to cut off from illegitimate network connection.
4. Governance – Against unauthenticated connection, access and plugin. Fang used Google’s pulling out of China as an example to imply that when a company pulls out, its service in China should be ceased.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-censorship tools, Fang Binxing, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Tor
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© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Chinese media, Falun Gong, Great Firewall, information control, Internet censorship, Public Security Bureau, self-immolation, Tiananmen Square
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The following list was originally done on November 2 [using simplified characters].

© sandra for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: filtered keywords, Internet censorship, sinaweibo
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