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A Detailed Dive Into China's Information Underground

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the censor-this dept.

eldavojohn writes "MIT's Tech Review has an article on the current state of Internet censorship in China. We've read the stories about Green Dam and the Great Firewall, but this article relates the story of one of the many ways around these tools and how they're little more than an added complexity to getting what you want from the Internet in China. The article starts out with an aliased user named Xiaomi who wakes up and utilizes Google Docs to collaborate with other Mandarin-English speakers so they can translate the day's news. Once it's there she makes it public and sends out a note on Twitter and Buzz to her followers, who copy the document to their blogs and link back to the public Google Document. The blogs survive for various lengths of time, but while they are up more people read and publish to their blogs, and the pyramid branches out." (Read more, below.) The article explains the complicated chain of tools she employs to avoid being invited down to a police station to "drink tea" (interrogation and imprisonment). Although anonymous and unrewarded, Xiaomi's work is crucial to China. An MIT expert on China claims, "The Internet has empowered the Chinese people more than the combined effects of 30 years of [economic] growth, urbanization, exports, and investments by foreign firms." By the time all is said and done, Chinese censorship is little more than mocked by thousands of people like Xiaomi. The cofounder of Global Voices explains, "We assume censored means 'Dead. Lifeless. Artificial.' What 'censored' actually means is 'really, really complicated.'" Despite our dire view of Chinese censorship, the article presents comprehensive evidence of people not only avoiding it altogether but successfully anonymously working together to avoid it, as well as protests going viral on the Internet in China. On the Internet, where there's a will there's a way.

21 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Brave People by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    little more than an added complexity to getting what you want from the internet in China

    Basic communication shouldn't take heroic levels of bravery. People have been imprisoned in China for doing less than what she is doing.

    1. Re:Brave People by LS · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As someone who's lived in Beijing for 5 years, it's not all that heroic. There are millions of people posting things, and they just get deleted wack-a-mole style if the content is not "harmonious". The only people that get arrested are serious critics of the government who get a lot of exposure. The average middle class person in Beijing is definitely more informed about a lot of things that your average American Fox viewer. Anyway they don't care too much about the smaller upper and middle classes - the firewall and the scare tactics are mainly targeted at the masses.

      --
      There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
    2. Re:Brave People by MozeeToby · · Score: 4, Insightful

      All that that means is that at any moment she could post the 'wrong' thing that generates lots of attention and find herself in trouble. The fact that it does happen sometimes is more than enough to make the behavior brave in my opinion, certainly braver than anything I've done with my life. And by the sound of it she is the source for a substantial amount of leaks through the firewall, just because it gets propagated through many different blogs and silently deleted doesn't mean that no one is looking for the source. Saying no one really gets harassed unless they get a large audience puts these people at the whim of their audience, what they're doing is dangerous because at any moment, without them changing anything at all, they could find themselves in very deep water.

  2. Re:Pointless by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 3, Funny

    There's nothing of value on the internet

    Proven by /. every single day. ):

    --
    "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
  3. Where there's a will by devnullkac · · Score: 2, Insightful

    On the internet, where there's a will there's a way.

    If you accept that postulate, I've got a corollary: On the internet, whoever has the strongest will gets his way. The "evade content censorship" goal has no inherent superiority over the "censor content" goal. Whichever goal has the most (or most potent) resources applied can still win out.

    --
    What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
    1. Re:Where there's a will by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The general attitude in China, from what I've gathered over the past two years, is that political freedom is not a high priority to the average citizen, as long as the government continues to handle the economy well.

    2. Re:Where there's a will by zero_out · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Who wins really depends on what you define as the goal. If you define the goal of censors as "preventing any undesired material from getting through" then they are doomed to failure. They would need to win every single time, squashing every single instance of material that they wish to block. The evaders would only need to get one piece of material past the censors to win.

      The real goal is much more complicated, and depends on critical mass of information being achieved for the evaders to win, while the censors need only prevent this critical mass from being achieved. It's much like childhood vaccinations. For the disease to win, it needs to reach critical mass in the herd, infecting a certain percentage of the population to become self-perpetuating. For the herd to win, it needs to prevent the disease from reaching critical mass. A few small pockets of individuals can be sacrificed for the greater good of the herd, but as long as those pockets are small and contained, critical mass won't be achieved, and a full-blown outbreak can be prevented.

      So what do you think the Chinese government's goal is? The blocking of every instance of undesired material from getting through, and "protecting" every single citizen? Or is it prevention of critical mass, which would mean that enough people learn the truth that they decide to overthrow the government?

    3. Re:Where there's a will by zero_out · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As long as people have their bread and circuses, they will be content. The Roman Empire figured that out a long time ago, and it's still true today.

  4. If you build a better lock... by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    then you end up wiith better lock pickers.

    We might see some 'revolutionary' developments in collaboration come from this, hopefully we can all learn from it.

    --
    Wherever You Go, There You Are
    1. Re:If you build a better lock... by eldavojohn · · Score: 2, Insightful

      then you end up wiith better lock pickers.

      We might see some 'revolutionary' developments in collaboration come from this, hopefully we can all learn from it.

      The problem is that we're all using the same tools to achieve different goals. I use Google Docs to share song names and artists that I like with my friends simply because all the other site solutions (like Last.FM) are flash laden crap that I have no control over and never can find the bands I listen to like The Wapsipinicon. And I can throw a link to a blog with a publicly legally available promotional mp3. So the Chinese goal is a lot more serious and has this oppressive government forcing them to be anonymous. Me, I trust people to view and help edit my spreadsheet. My friends know who I am and we're pass the anonymous stage. Our revolutionary collaboration is going to be done with various levels of contribution, reputation, trust and background knowledge or technology wise (what if I could build mix CD song lists in tandem with friends through a site and publish it to facebook?). All the Chinese have is anonymity because of their different situation and they are dealing with words and information. The advancements they find are stunted by their situation.

      So unless our government gets to be as bad as theirs (and I'm not saying that's out of the question), I don't know what tactics they are dreaming up that are going to help me right now or improve my collaboration. And they don't seem to be writing a whole lot of ground breaking software ... at least not for English speaking only users like myself. I'm not complaining, I'm just confused how I'm going to learn from this aside from maintaining an underground if I need it which -- thank god -- I don't. But perhaps the future holds a RIAA stasi that finds people like me transmitting information about non-RIAA bands and dispatches death squads to my door ...

      --
      My work here is dung.
  5. Numbers by bakuun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "By the time all is said and done, Chinese censorship is little more than mocked by thousands of people like Xiaomi"

    Now, let's put that number, "thousands", into perspective: China has a population of about 1.3 billion.

    1. Re:Numbers by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "By the time all is said and done, Chinese censorship is little more than mocked by thousands of people like Xiaomi" Now, let's put that number, "thousands", into perspective: China has a population of about 1.3 billion.

      And 384 million of which are Internet users--nearly a quarter of the world total. The 'thousands' I was referring to are the people like Xiaomi who translate the content. Then thousands for each of those people post to their blogs. Then some undetermined chain goes into effect where they keep reposting and sending. It's immeasurable but this is just on the producing end of it. There's obviously a demand for this material so you can be sure that millions are reading these posts and reposts and e-mails. While we'll never be able to settle on whether it's 10 million or 100 million that have accessed a non-harmonious article in the past year, you can be sure it's in the millions for readership ... maybe even production and distribution have over a million.

      If you read the article (and I thought I made it clear in the summary with the pyramid analogy), it sounds like there are a lot of eyes on this stuff. Nothing to sneeze at like you did. In the end, the article made it seem like accessing the New York Times interview with Google cofounder Sergey Brin (in wihch he speaks out against China's censorship) was not that hard of a thing to do if you wanted to do it in China.

      --
      My work here is dung.
    2. Re:Numbers by MikeDaSpike · · Score: 2, Interesting

      China
      Population: 1,325,639,982
      % of internet users: 22
      Number of internet users: 291,640,796

      United States
      Population: 307,006,550
      % of internet users: 72
      Number of internet users: 221,044,716

      In other words, despise having 4 times the population of the US, china only has less than 50% more internet users. Your perspective is skewed.

    3. Re:Numbers by Reapman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's like saying nobody uses Microsoft Windows because only a few few hundred (thousand?) people built the software. It's typical that the content providers are a smaller group then the content consumers. People like Xiaomi are likely your "hardcore" group, the group that feels the strongest about it and which always makes up the smallest %.

      Most people consume media, not distribute it.

  6. Cause and Effect by Jeng · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Could the reason that China has so many cyber-criminals be a side-effect of the Great Firewall of China?

    --
    Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
    1. Re:Cause and Effect by robot256 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hey, it almost sounds like an premeditated consequence. Like, hey, if we oppress most of the population into submission, those smart enough to fight back will figure stuff out that we can use on other people, or we could even hire them.

    2. Re:Cause and Effect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I doubt it. The great firewall isn't something most "normal" netizens notice. Almost all the Chinese I know (been living here for 2 years) *only* access sites internal to China, so the great firewall doesn't even come into play (other forms of censorship such as government regulations over blogs and site ownership, self-censorship by sites, etc are evident).

      If I had to pinpoint a cause for all the crackers and pirates in China, I'd ascribe it to the general culture of lawlessness here. It's a culture that in many ways reminds me of wild west stories: for all the "big brother" scariness of the Chinese government, they honestly don't have a very strict control over the population in many ways. Examples: thousands of illegal golf courses that the government is unaware of (or which the local government is secretly sponsoring); food supply chain issues such as cancer-causing recycling of restaurant oil (called "swill oil") that the government seems unable to crack down on meaningfully, tainted milk, etc; secret gun factories that every once in a while are busted; people having a complete disregard for littering or traffic laws... This is a government that is unable or in some cases unwilling to crack down on many illegal and harmful practices.

    3. Re:Cause and Effect by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ``This is a government that is unable or in some cases unwilling to crack down on many illegal and harmful practices.''

      That sounds a lot like a typical corrupt government, to me. I seem to recall corruption has been receiving quite some attention in official political statements in recent years. Any insights on how things are progressing there?

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  7. Censorship is ... censorship. by d474 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure, while people who have the expertise, time, and desire to circumvent "censorship" may just view censorship as a mere "complication", for the rest of the population who are work hard all day and lack both the energy and prowess and are afraid of being arrested, it's still censorship.

    And it's more than just censorship, it's stuff that fills the void of truth like propaganda and disinformation. Just mix it all together and you have most of the populace which is misinformed and under, for lack of better terms, a soft form of mind control.

    --
    Authority questions you. Return the favor.
  8. Re:Cut them off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's their government that's fucked up. Not the people. The people (for the most part) are great.

    If you really step back and examine it, America and most other countries are basically in the same situation at varying degrees of fucked-upedness. It's the vocal minority, or in religious circles, the vocal majority, and the governments in power that are totally fucked.

    Overall, you'll find people are good. It's the politicians and those in power that are total douche-bags.

  9. Is the PRC Creating Stronger Opposition? by Neuroticwhine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You have to wonder how this is changing the psychology of the standard citizen. The more people need to rely on each other to circumvent the government restrictions, the less strength the government itself has as a controlling body; ironically enough, i wonder if the additional reliance on your neighbor would create a tighter knit, more ready to challenge the government community.