Slashdot Mirror
How China Cracks Down On Internet Dissidents
skippywalker turned us on to a
Washington Post article about how the People's Republic of China, instead of viewing the Internet as a means of liberation, sees it as a tool for maintaining political control.
20% "China is a great country, and the fact they ran this story just shows Slashdot's xenophobia."
30% "FUX0R CHINA! AMERIKKKA R00LZ!"
10% "I have hot grits down my pants RIGHT NOW."
20% "What's this got to do with Linux?"
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You've probably heard it many many times. The Internet is just a tool. I've heard people talk about how the Internet revolutionized commerce, how it revolutionized our understanding of information.
The Internet doesn't do jack. The Internet is a tool. Hammers are tools, too. A hammer can be used to pound a nail into a wall. A hammer can also be used, ironically, to pull a nail out of a wall. A hammer can be used to kill someone. A hammer can be used to save someone.
China's just using the Internet as a tool. Everything's a political tool in China. What's really ironic is that financial transactions will probably be safer with Chinese financial institutions because they're actually putting in place an Internet infrastructure that they can police. Rather than security being site-centric like it is in Western countries, security is being country-centric in China, meaning that while you may have less anonymity, so do the bad guys.
But again, it's just a tool. China's not abusing the Internet. They're just defining the way in which they're going to use their tool, and it just happens to be different from the Western ideology.
I live in Pakistan, which is also a pretty authoritarian state. What's interesting to me is our governments' policies regarding the net and IT in general. The reason i mention this here is because i some parallels...
ok, according to our law, you can't use encryption, your email and stuff is readable by the govt, what you say can be held against you etc. but on the other hand, none of these laws are actually implemented. my former college, which is owned by the navy, teaches RSA, for example. So the deal is that they want to keep the economy open to whatever benefits CS and IT can bring, but they want a saftey net, "just in case". I think China is leaning more towards the saftey net mentality. And since they are pretty much the closest thing to facism you're gonna find today, i guess they have a need to be paraniod. My government is making this tech very open and accessable cuz they feel our economy needs it. How accessable? well the only national backbone provider is a govt-owned and protected monopoly. But my city has like 10 or 15 ISP's and i get flat modem access for around $20/mo. Compare against our neighbour India, which has only one state-owned ISP (legally protected monoploy, last i heard), and you'll see that this is a pretty big deal for this reigon.
China, with all the trade deals they keep getting (from the US, and the thaw with the WTO), don't feel that economic need. Ultimately, the govt's who supress their people are the one's that can *afford* to.
Think about it. If people in china have less of a voice, who's paying to make that happen? the IMF? the WTO? Uncle Sam? You?
You have the MPAA getting police to kick down doors and drag 16 y/o to jail.
You have the CPHack case.
We have corporations use lawsuits to shut people up instead of throwing them in jail. Or judges that give vague orders and threaten jail.
Fight Spammers!
"...the Ministry of State Security "has been able to track individual e-mail accounts through monitoring devices on Internet Service Providers. Internet bulletin boards were subject to round-the-clock monitoring..."
Dude, I'll bet over there if you go to a message board topic just to write "Woohoo!! First Post!!" the cops come and shoot you in the head. Cool.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
How many people have you chatted with from China?
Last year, when my son graduated from high school, I wanted to take him on a trip around the world to celebrate his achievements. (He also was awarded his Eagle Scout rank. And was a leader of his Sea Scout group.) My plans were to fly to Beijing and take the Trans Mongolian rail to Irkutsk, Russia, and then the Trans Siberian rail to Moscow and points west. But the Yugoslavian war came along and we had to do a tour of Europe instead. It had become too dangerous for Americans to travel in Russia and China may have ignored our visas when we stepped off the plane.
But during the process of getting ready before we had to call that trip off, I got familiar with the Chinese people on the Internet in both Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. I exchanged email with a few people in those cities. One guy in Shanghai was interested in getting a new digital camera and so was I so we compared notes.
One woman I exchanged email with worked in Beijing for the government monitoring the Internet for sites that were "anti-Chinese" (meaning any criticism of the government's policies, whether they were political, sexual, or religious). I didn't want to put her on the spot by raising the moral and ethical issues that her job implied. And she was helpful on getting an inexpensive place to stay.
But I was reminded of similar censoring responsibilities our own civilization assigned to the religious establishments up until the mid-1950s. We mostly think of them as being anti-ponorgaphic but even earlier they and the governments of Europe (the USA wasn't around yet) were quite active in suppressing any anti-government sentiment until it boiled over into revolutions.
Look back on our own history and discover how we moved to a more open society. Basically, the truth is that a centralized government is the most inefficient form of government and slowly falls apart by its own centripital forces. Intelligent people in China will become astute in using that to their advantage. It is a dangerous game but the demon that allowed the cultural revolution to start is dead and slowly being turned into a beneign shadow of his former SOB self.
That is the threat that China is faced with. If it suppresses too much it will eventually face a revolution. If it has too much freedom of expression it will (it believes) disintegrate into anarchy. And its people have the dangerous game of teasing this mad beast into doing what it would not do itself.
China has the following difficult problems to solve: 1) Its population, 2) How to move to a Democracy without falling into revolution or anarchy. Everything else is minor by comparison.
Bypassing the government censors will happen. Our job is to help it happen. You do want Chinese to be able to read Slasdot, don't you?
So China must open up whether it wants to or not a little bit at a time. I have this visual image of a person timidly and slowly getting wet at the edge of an ocean. Yes, it is silly and tragic. But it is their choice (so far). And at least there is email communication, even if it is somewhat limited. And there are Internet cafes in Beijing and other large Cities (almost every city in China is a large city by our standards).
So I challenge you out there to come up with clever ways to help the Chinese citizens to bypass their government censors! It is really not that difficult a problem if you think about it. Have fun.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein