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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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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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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Post tags: Internet control, Internet regulation, photos, self-censorship, Xiao Qiang
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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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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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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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Post tags: fifty cent party, Internet control, satire
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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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Post tags: Confucianism, freedom of expression, Googlecn, Internet control, national identity
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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.

(...)
Read the rest of Video: “网瘾战争 War of Internet Addiction” (Updated) (953 words)

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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.

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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.

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Post tags: Internet control, Internet development, IT industry
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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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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.

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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.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet control, Online porn
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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.

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China plans to restore online access and lift a ban on text messages and international calls in Xinjiang, state media said Tuesday, months after deadly ethnic unrest prompted a communications shutdown.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted the regional government as saying it had restored access to part of the wire’s website as well as parts of the website of the state-run People’s Daily newspaper.

“And according to relevant circumstances, (the government) will gradually restore access to other websites and Internet services, and open up mobile text messages and international long-distance phone services,” the report said.

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China has placed more than 4.65 million computers at some 80,000 Internet cafes under watch in a bid to crack down on violent or pornographic online games, state media reported Friday.

Xinhua quoted Culture Minister Cai Wu as saying in an interview that his ministry had banned 219 Internet games for carrying “lewd, pornographic and violent” content and had blocked access to games 87 million times this year.

Cai’s ministry plans to step up regulation of the fast-expanding online game sector and “would improve censorship of the games in the future,” Xinhua reported.

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A handful of homegrown micro-blogging sites emerged about the same time Twitter started to gain a small, yet steadily growing, share of Chinese Internet users, beginning about 2007, around a year after Twitter was launched in the U.S. in 2006.

While almost all of the early Chinese micro-blogging pioneers faced the same fate as Twitter, most of the sites are now back online and are fiercely competing to gain a share of what many predict will soon be an exploding population of Chinese micro-bloggers.

Alex Mou is the founder of one of them. He started a Twitter-like site called Zuosa, which was shut down for “self maintenance” on July 21, around two months after Twitter was first blocked in early June.

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China has issued new Internet regulations, including what appears to be an effort to create a “whitelist” of approved websites that could potentially place much of the Internet off-limits to Chinese readers.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ordered domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten control over domain name registration, in a three-phase plan laid out on its website (www.miit.gov.cn) late on Sunday.

“Domain names that have not registered will not be resolved or transferred,” MIIT said, in an action plan to “further deepen” an ongoing anti-pornography campaign that has resulted in significant tightening of Chinese Internet controls.

2009 has marked a time of media tightening. Read also about the fate of the TV show ‘Snail House’ on CDT.

Update: See Danwei’s translation of MIIT’s five measures, “MIIT considers a white-list of approved websites.” The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time China Blog, however, notes that there may be no such white-list under consideration:

However, there’s nothing in the MIIT document that actually discusses such a white-list system. The line that has drawn attention is the third clause in item No. 6 of the Phase II section of the document, which says “Domain names of Web sites that haven’t yet been registered won’t be resolved.” But there’s no indication that this applies to foreign Web sites. Rather, the clause appears to be part of the broader tightening of the vetting process for Chinese domain names—an initiative that first surfaced last week.

Applicants for Chinese “.cn” domain names have always had to register. Last week’s rules basically said that applications will be more closely scrutinized and applicants must prove they are affiliated with a company or other officially registered organization – making it much more difficult for individuals to set up “.cn” sites.

Shen Yang, chief editor of the book “The Economics of China’s Domain Names”, who has discussed the new document in meetings with MIIT officials, says media reports about a white list and registration of overseas Web sites are inaccurate. “It’s totally a rumor,” he says.

Some analysts had speculated last week that the tighter vetting of “.cn” domain applications would simply drive more Chinese Web site proprietors to register their sites overseas. And indeed, one Chinese newspaper reported Tuesday that Chinese registrations of “.com” addresses have spiked since last week. It may have been anticipation of government efforts to close that loophole that fueled the speculation about a white list.

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The year 2009 will not be remembered as the year Chinese censors decided to lighten up. This week, the Chinese agency that oversees the country’s Internet-domain-name registry announced it will limit the system to use by businesses, effectively excluding private citizens from registering new domains. The new rules, which the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) put into place on Dec. 14, are meant to restrict online pornography. But some new-media experts say they may add another tool to the country’s array of Internet controls. “Many believe that the crackdown on porn was just an excuse,” says Isaac Mao, a Chinese blogger and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The real reason has to do with the various goals of Internet censorship, one of which is to curb the individual’s voice.”

Web censorship in China is rarely an all-or-nothing endeavor. When a site begins to carry too many materials or too much commentary that the authorities find objectionable, it will get blocked if based overseas, or highly restricted or possibly closed if it’s based in China. Web users move on to new haunts or find new routes to old ones. But by plugging enough holes and muffling enough dissenting voices, China’s Communist Party curbs online opposition to its rule while still allowing the Internet to be open enough to not dangerously impede commerce.

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