From The International Herald Tribune:

You can find anything you want on China’s Internet: sex, fashion, business, travel, entertainment, and romance. Except Democracy, Tiananmen, Taiwan, human rights, Tibet and hundreds of other subjects such as universities and governments.

Chinese searching the Internet for key, or “black” words are likely to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned, perhaps for ten years, for subversion, revealing state secrets, or spreading propaganda injurious to the State. They will meet a similar fate if they use “black” words in something they post on the Internet, especially for foreigners to read.

This is the biggest State censorship ever. John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, testified to Congress last April. Fear, he said, “has led the Chinese government to create the world’s most sophisticated Internet filtering regime. The People’s Republic of China has the most extensive and effective legal and technological systems. China’s system prevents users from accessing most politically sensitive content on the Internet, including information about opposition political groups, independence movements, the Falun Gong spiritual movement, the Dalai Lama, and the Tiananmen Square incident. China’s system blocks virtually all BBC content and much CNN content.” This surveillance and blocking, the Harvard experts have found, extends over tens of thousands of sites.

Some Westerners will shrug their shoulders, simply filing internet censorship in their mental index of Chinese human rights violations from Lhasa to Tiananmen. Despite its rapid economic expansion, they may imagine, China is at best a second-world country when it comes to sophisticated technology.

But Beijing has the very best help. Some of the world’s most famous Internet companies, one might say in the case of Google motto: “Do No Evil” – most loved, have lined up to show China how to cripple what the Internet was designed to do: make information easy to get. A partial list includes Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Skype. Each has its expertise. Google removes from its Chinese web site whatever the Chinese deem politically sensitive. According to Reporters without Frontiers, “Cisco Systems has sold several thousand routers to enable

the regime to build an online spying system and the firm’s engineers have helped set it to spot ‘subversive’ key-words in messages. The system also enables police to know who has looked at banned sites or sent ‘dangerous’ e-mails.”

In 2002 Yahoo, which has links with Cisco, signed a document called a “Public Pledge on Self-discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry.” That agreement led to disaster for Shi Tao. Mr.Shi, age 37, worked for a business daily. On April 30, last year, he was sentenced to ten years behind bars for revealing a “jue mi,” top state secret, to foreign

websites. The secret was an official warning to the media on the threat to China posed by dissidents returning to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen killings. Yahoo and Cisco furnished the technology that permitted the security services to identify Mr Shi. According to Joseph Kahn in the New York Times, “Shi’s case alarmed critics of the Chinese government because his posting did not reveal the sender or the source of the information. That meant the authorities had no more to go on when they began their investigation than an anonymous posting on a U.S.-based Web site. Beijing State security officials pinpointed the Chinese source of the e-mail to Democracy Forum that contained the information . ”

All the American companies helping the Chinese police State insist they are merely obeying local laws. A Cisco spokesman for the Asia-Pacific region, said, “Our perspective is that it’s the user, not Cisco, that determines the functionality and uses to which the technology is put.” To attack companies like Cisco, he added, ignores “how astronomically beneficial to China the Internet is.” Google’s spokesman stated that defying could result in Google News being kept out of China and millions of dollars-worth of business – altogether. ” The “trade-off,” he explained, is in the “best interests of our users located in China.” Yahoo’s chief executive officer also justified his company’s actions: “It’s just really important for us to have good relations and good partnerships with governments all over the world.” “This is a complex and difficult issue,” said Brooke Richardson, of Microsoft. “We think it’s better to be there with our services than not be there.”

There is much talk in the West about China taking over the global economy within a few decades and gobbling up much of the world’s oil. Optimists suggest that Chinese economic reform will soon be followed by political reform. There is little evidence for this. President Hu Jintao is more repressive than his predecessor. Most of the Chinese returning from Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne will dissolve into the vast sea of Chinese whose view of the world is shaped by the Communist Party.

But should we care what Chinese are reading on the Internet? Harvard’s John Palfrey is blunt: “Most of all, the ramifications of this censorship regime should be of concern to anyone who believes in participatory democracy. How the Chinese government restricts its citizens’ online interactions is significantly altering the global Internet landscape.”

Americans who think that in any event China is far away may be jolted by this suggestion from Rebecca MacKinnon, an ex-foreign correspondent in China now specialising in internet censorship: “If these American technology companies have so few moral qualms about giving in to Chinese government demands to hand over Chinese user data or censor Chinese people’s content, can we be sure they won’t do the same thing in response to potentially illegal demands by an over-zealous government agency in our own country? Or will we all sit there like frogs in water being brought very slowly to a boil?”