China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Internet control (265)

• A Confession of an Internet Naked Runner

  

  Global Voices translates “Confession of an Internet naked runner,” by Zhang Lifan, a public response to real name registration requirements on the Chinese Internet:

  In recent years, the Internet public opinion has threatened corrupted government officials. There is a huge tension between robber and crime fighter, monitoring and reaction against monitoring. The “real name registration” for government officials’ property has been brought out since 1995, but still being resisted. While the “real name registration” of internet users was introduced three years ago, it has already been implemented in some regions. Policies that are favorable towards government officials would be implemented in full speed, while those that are against their interests would encounter a lot of difficulties. Many netizens mock the situation as the new “Two Whatevers“. What has occupied the drunk’s mind is not the alcohol, the “whitelisting” and “real name registration” of the Internet has very suspicious motive. Dont’ they see that the blocking of public opinion would eventually bring people to the street? And the control over citizen access to information would bring about savagery?
  　
  Cartoonist Kuang Biao has a popular drawing: an ordinary citizen stripped off his clothes until he only has his underpants on says to a well-dressed government official that “now it is your turn”. Transparence is now a trend, if we are to go naked, everyone has to strip their clothes off by making public of their income and property. The Internet is like a paper window full of holes now, whether netizens use their real name or stay anonymous, they are running naked. If we all tell the truth in real name, hopefully we can attain our freedom away from fear.

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  • March 7, 2010 10:55 PM

• Unlicensed Journalists Are no Laughing Matter, GAPP Says

  

  China Media Project looks at one of the skits in the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which may have been more subversive than intended:

  Zhao, in his role as a simple peasant in the countryside, sits on the stoop outside his home, when two men — one with a video camera hoisted over his shoulder — come by introducing themselves as “online journalists.” They work for an imaginary Sohu.com program called “Seeking the Root of the Matter” (刨根问底). They want to interview Zhao’s character and make the interview available “to the whole world” via the Internet.

  That may sound harmless enough. But the two reporters for “Seeking the Root of the Matter” would, according to administrative regulations in China, be denied press accreditation in the first place. And that means the entire fictional interview that provides the frame for the Zhao Benshan skit depicts an illegal act.

  The Zhao Benshan skit — and its censorship gaffe — is particularly interesting in that it depicts something both increasingly commonplace in China — that is, information gathering and dissemination by unauthorized “citizen journalists,” or gongmin jizhe (公民记者), of all stripes — and increasingly vexing to CCP leaders who want, as best as possible, to control information at its source.

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  • March 2, 2010 2:40 PM

• Student Blogger: A Brief Story About My “Tea” at School on June 4th of Last Year

  

  “Drinking Tea” (喝茶) is now a common vocabulary in online political discourse. It refers to the widespread practices by DSD police or other authorities to harass, intimidate and conduct information-gathering on citizens for their political activities. Although each such “Tea” session always comes with the warning to keep the conversation to oneself, more and more netizens have been sharing their “Drinking Tea” experiences; as a result, we can see that the government effort to control online speech goes way beyond technological filtering and deleting of content and blocking of foreign websites.

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  • February 28, 2010 11:39 PM

• China Launches Strict New Internet Controls (With Photo)

  

  Anyone who wants to open a website in China now has to have a face-to-face meeting with regulators first, AP reports:

  The state-sanctioned group that registers domain names in China froze registrations for new individual Web sites in December after state media complained that not enough was being done to check whether sites provided pornographic content.

  The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that ban was being lifted, but would-be operators would now have submit their identity cards and photos of themselves as well as meet in person with regulators and representatives of service providers before their sites could be registered.

  It said the rule was aimed at cracking down on pornography.

  China has the world’s biggest online population, with 384 million Internet users. The government operates the world’s most extensive system of Web monitoring and filtering, blocking pornographic sites as well as those seen as subversive to communist rule.

  ChinaZ.com, a community website for webmasters reported the photo requirement and process with the following actual photo:

  

  Update: From LA Times:
  

  “Internet security needs to be cured from its roots,” Li Yizhong, head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, was quoted as saying in a state news article Sunday.

  Critics say the new requirement has little to do with pornography and instead serves to increase controls and discourage web users from engaging in any activity that challenged the government.

  For all its complexity, experts say the key to the government’s controls is not its filtering technology or registration requirements, but the willingness of individuals to censor themselves.

  “This new measure comes as no surprise, since a key element of control has always been about how to use disciplinary punishment and surveillance to create a self-censorship environment,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. “The government feels increasingly insecure with their ability to control the Internet, therefore more and more policies and controlling practices are aimed at enhancing a self-policing environment.”

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  • February 23, 2010 1:21 PM

• Corndog Speaks on ‘War of Internet Addiction’

  

  The creator of the viral hit “War of Internet Addiction,” a satirical take on government controls over online gaming, spoke to the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time China blog:

  WSJ: How did you choose which social events to put into your script?

  Corndog: The social events … had to be able to contribute to the development of the plot. After all, I wasn’t making a documentary. Secondly, they had to be hot-topic events, which anyone accessing the Internet would know. Third, it was better if they triggered more humor.

  WSJ: Did you play the role of Kan Ni Mei? Did he express your own ideas? Does his name have any special meaning?

  Corndog: Our team has developed three videos for the character Kan Ni Mei. He’s fictional. Some of the script expresses my own ideas.

  There is a story behind the origin of Kan Ni Mei. One gamer uploaded his own photo to a gaming forum of a “Tauren,” a [Warcraft character] with a bull’s head, who was dressed

  in clothes his character wasn’t supposed to wear. People who understood the game found this photo very hilarious … and it was spread widely, so we used it as the film’s protagonist. Kan Ni Mei has no other meaning.

  Watch the movie with English subtitles here.

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  • February 21, 2010 11:19 PM

• Li Yizhong (李毅中): Internet Information Security Facing Severe Challenge

  

  From the Sina.cn Technology Channel, translated by CDT:

  News from the morning of Feb. 22: Li Yizhong (李毅中), the Party Secretary and Minister of Industry and Information Technology made a report on the economic situation yesterday. During the report, Minister Li pointed out that while the information industry of our country has been growing rapidly, Internet information security is currently facing a severe challenge. The top responsibility is to ensure security. In the meantime, relevant departments are studying how to implement real name registration in mobile phones and the Internet.

  2月22日上午消息，工信部党组书记、部长李毅中昨日在作经济形势报告报告时指出，我国信息产业迅猛发展的同时，网络信息安全当前面临严峻挑战，保障安全是第一责任。与此同时，相关部门正研究实施手机、网络实名制。

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  • February 21, 2010 9:52 PM

• The Fifty Cents Party Training Manual

  

  ChinaGeeks translates a satircial training manual for the “fifty cent party,” or government-hired Internet commentators who post anonymous comments to try to sway public opinion:

  Comment: This chicken egg tastes disgusting.
  Response: The duck egg next door is even worse tasting, how could you not mention this?

  Comment: This chicken egg tastes disgusting.
  Response: Please make a constructive comment, if you’ve got talent then lay a better tasting egg yourself.

  Comment: This chicken egg tastes disgusting.
  Response: This egg was laid by an industrious, courageous, good, kind, honest, and upright chicken!

  Comment: This chicken egg tastes disgusting.
  Response: It’s way better than last year’s egg.

  Comment: This chicken egg tastes disgusting.
  Response: You grew up [by] eating this egg, what right do you have to say it tastes bad?

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  • February 17, 2010 8:58 PM

• Ian Buruma: Battling the Information Barbarians

  

  In the Wall Street Journal, Ian Buruma writes about Google vs. China and the history of information control in China:

  Thought control, in terms of imposing an official orthodoxy, is a very old tradition. The official glue that has long been applied to hold Chinese society together is a kind of state dogma, loosely known as Confucianism, which is moral as well as political, stressing obedience to authority. This is what officials like to call Chinese culture.

  One can take a more cynical view, of course, and see culture as a mere fig leaf meant to hide the machinations of political power. The latest Chinese salvo against the U.S., blaming the Americans for instigating rebellion in Iran through the Internet, reveals that the current spat has a hard (and opportunistic) political core. And the assumption that Google, as a Chinese editorial put it, is a “political pawn” of the U.S. government, is a clear case of projection.

  In any case, instilling the belief that obedience to authority is not just a way to keep order, but an essential part of being Chinese, is highly convenient for those who wield authority, whether they be fathers of a family or rulers of the state. That is why in their efforts to promote democracy after World War I, Chinese intellectuals denounced Confucianism, with its rigid social hierarchy, as an outmoded orthodoxy which had to be eradicated.

  For another historical perspective on the Google issue and the fight for Internet freedom, see this essay by Geremie R. Barmé.

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  • January 30, 2010 10:34 AM

• Video: “网瘾战争 War of Internet Addiction” (Updated)

  

  DigiCha has posted links to YouTube videos, now with English subtitles, mocking government efforts to crackdown on gaming (Videos embedded below). DigiCha points out that episode 6 (of 7) has the most obvious discussion of Internet controls. This video has already had more than million visits inside of China. From their introduction:

  It is an hour long video, “shot” almost entirely with in-game video from World of Warcraft, satirizing the government’s attempt to “harmonize” China’s Internet with forced installations of “Green Dam Youth Escort” and the travails of Chinese World of Warcraft players over the last several months.

  …The film tracks the fight between The9 ($NCTY) and Netease ($NTES) over the renewal rights to Activision Blizzard’s ($ATVI) World of Warcraft, the requirement that skulls be removed from World of Warcraft (hence the Skull Party), the bureaucratic battles between GAPP and the Ministry of Culture over the re-approval of WoW in China, the money-obsessed Uncle Yang and his Internet addiction camps and electro-shock therapy (see this forthcoming Feb 2010 Wired article on China’s Internet addiction camps), and the attempts to impose “Green Dam Youth Escort” software on Chinese web users. The movie concludes with an impassioned speech calling for Chinese World of Warcraft players to end their silence and fight the attempts to keep them away from World of Warcraft, followed by an agreement between the warring bureaucracies-GAPP and MOC–to put aside their dispute and go after Netease for more money.

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  • January 26, 2010 4:28 PM

• Sim Chi Yin: Up Against the ‘Great Firewall’

  

  From the The Malaysian Insider, (via Wandering China blog):

  Each time Web portal executive Li (not his real name) receives an e-mail from his political masters telling him to remove certain posts and articles, he curses under his breath – and then immediately carries out the orders.

  Heavy-handed – and tightening – censorship was a key reason cited by international cyber giant Google for possibly quitting China, the world’s largest Internet market.

  But it is a daily reality for the thousands of fresh-faced Chinese who work in China’s “Silicon Valley”, Zhongguancun, in west Beijing.

  Mostly graduates of top local universities, many struggle with the sort of “schizophrenia” Li professes to have – yearning for free flow of information but having to block an ever-growing list of “sensitive” words and content.

  » Read more
  • January 24, 2010 10:09 AM

• Xie Wen: Page Not Found

  

  Caixin writes about “a mounting crisis for the Internet in China” which is largely due to vested interests in the industry:

  The industry’s revenue structure is marked by strange distribution patterns. Online game industry revenues exceeded 30 billion yuan in 2009. But revenues from online advertising were only 20 billion yuan, and Internet commerce and services income totaled less than 20 billion yuan. So unlike the Internet industry in developed countries, or in any other Chinese business sector, China’s Internet industry revenue structure is freakish, unstable and unsustainable.

  The reason is simple: Areas into which the Internet industry can and should be moving are chock-full of longstanding vested interests, especially those of the state-owned monopoly variety. Internet entrepreneurs trying to gain a foothold in these areas are subject to overt or covert resistance, often under a banner of morality, social values, national stability or public safety. They may be attacked and punished. The heavy handedness, artless technique, shallow reasoning, disrespect of human rights, and brazen acts of interest groups are all reminiscent of another time: It’s as if we’ve returned to the days of the Cultural Revolution.

  But anti-competitive acts violate China’s effort to build an information society and market mechanisms. Some 2009 events as well as ongoing activities have been unprecedented in the decade since China connected to the Internet. Worth noting are the Green Dam debacle, the World of Warcraft incident, Web site blocking, wireless WAP site cut-offs, and putting popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter behind a regulatory firewall.

  » Read more
  • January 10, 2010 11:34 PM

• China’s Web Crackdown Continues

  

  In the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, writes:

  China is doing its best to remind us that technology can also be a tool of suppression, with Beijing recommitting to censoring its large corner of the Internet. Last summer, the authorities required computer makers to install “Green Dam” software on every PC sold in China, which would block troubling political and religious sites. The regulation was put on hold. But last week a Santa Barbara-based company called Cybersitter sued China and several computer makers for $2.2 billion for allegedly stealing code from its parental-control software aimed at blocking pornography.

  The lawsuit—which faces an uphill climb because of difficulties in fighting global copyright violations—says makers of the Green Dam software lifted 3,000 lines of code from Cybersitter (even including some of its customer updates) and incorporated them into the Chinese software. Violations of rights to software in China are usually on display as close as the nearest side street, but it’s telling that the government would go to such lengths.

  Cybersitter alleges there were several thousand attempts from China to hack into its servers, some with thousands of attempts at access per session, including one traced back to a government ministry. Spoofed emails originating in China purported to come from Cybersitter staff and attempted to install Trojan code to lift information from the company’s servers.

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  • January 10, 2010 10:28 PM

• Chinayouren: China and the World Map of the Internet

  

  Last month, Chinayouren posted a series of diagrams illustrating the relationship between China and the World Wide Web, and demonstrating both the barriers that keep China’s Internet separate from the rest of the world and how various forces are bridging the gap:

  Because in Western countries internet penetration is very high and India is still lagging behind, in the next 10 years the Chinese internet will become almost as big as all the rest together. If it continues to diverge, it may grow into a parallel network, like a dark side of the moon, a vast, self-sufficient island that the government can cut out at any moment and most people inside it don’t even notice the difference. This defeats the whole idea of the www.

  Whatever the real magnitude of the problem, it is clear to most observers that there is a disconnect between China and the rest of the Internet, and there are powerful forces pulling her further apart. Fortunately, there are also forces working to balance this, and the results in the coming years will very much depend on how those factors play against each other.

  

  See more graphs here.

  » Read more
  • January 8, 2010 1:03 PM

• China Says 5,394 Arrested In Internet Porn Crackdown

  

  From Reuters:

  Chinese police arrested thousands in a drive against Internet pornography throughout 2009, officials said, vowing a deepening crackdown that critics say is being used to tighten overall censorship.

  The Chinese government has run a highly publicized campaign against what officials said were banned smutty and lewd pictures overwhelming the country’s Internet and threatening the emotional health of children.

  Chinese police said late on Thursday the crackdown on Internet pornography had brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009 — a fourfold increase in the number of such cases compared with 2008.

  » Read more
  • December 31, 2009 10:42 PM

• China Is Losing a War Over Internet

  

  Loretta Chao and Jason Dean reports on the Wall Street Journal:

  These appear to be dark days for the Internet in China.

  Four months into a crusade against Internet pornography, the government is closing thousands of sites—some pornographic, some not—and tightening rules on who can register Web addresses inside China.

  A backlash against Beijing’s moves to block access to the Internet has spurred attempts by many users to ’scale’ the so-called Great Firewall of censorship.
  Foreign sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, blocked by censors in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule on Oct. 1, remain inaccessible to most Chinese users. Several prominent critics of the state who used the Internet to spread their message have been detained or imprisoned.

  Yet this list of casualties obscures a larger truth: The censors are losing.

  … That the Internet threatens, fundamentally, the party’s information monopoly is one of the few facts that China’s liberal activists and its government enforcers agree on. In an essay published in December in a government magazine, Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu warned that the Internet “has become an important means for anti-China forces to engage in infiltration and sabotage, and to enlarge their power of destruction, which brings new challenges to the public security agencies to maintain national security and social stability.” He pointed to the use of the Internet to spread word of unrest before the government has a chance to control it.

  Please click here to read the full text.

  » Read more
  • December 31, 2009 12:10 AM

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