Notes on Chinese Internet Censorship: The (not so) Great Firewall.

An Interview With Rebecca MacKinnon - Hong Kong, May 2007

Censorship

The compelling image of Great Firewall of China fills the imagination with total impenetrability. The Firewall's integrity, like the Great Wall's itself, can withstand the Mongols and protect the people.

But just like the Great Wall, whose story to this day is one of impermanence, a single line that demarcates territory, the Great Firewall is equally a thing of political fantasy and propaganda.

Both Walls have always been technical failures, and never unified into a single defence system. The Chinese Internet is as porously protected by the Firewall as the country was by the actual Wall. That is, enough but not very well.

Sure, there's a reported 30,000 police crawling around sniffing out things the Party would find offensive. And there are machines, god knows what machines, but machines and software nonetheless made by the likes of Cisco that help filter out things at the 9 Internet gateways China has to the World Wide Web.

Nine, incidentally, is the same number of physical gates the ancient city of Beijing had to the outside world. Similar fortifications and political symbolism is attached to these newer, more permeable gates.

Some sites are simply blocked at the server level. For others, there is selective filtering.

But the common misunderstanding is that the government itself, in some kind of great big control room like a NASA launch-site, actively censors the entire Internet. That would be impossible.

Instead, they have outsourced the dirty business of weeding out minutiae to private business, whose very being is dependent on towing the Communist party's line on censorship.

"This is a huge cost", Rebecca MacKinnon tells me. "It's a huge burden on businesses. And there's no really clear rules about, you know: 'Here is the definitive list from the government of what you're supposed to censor'". Different companies employ different levels of censorship, the most famous example being Google not including references to Tiananmen Square or Taiwan Independence from the China-based servers. These results (though often not the sites the results linked to) were still available to users within China using Google's regular, US-based servers.

It's not an easy alliance, for businesses who also want to serve their customers - as is the wont of the modern Chinese economy shaping up to make money - with a quality service that boasts a minimum of intrusion.

"I think they're conflicted", says MacKinnon. "These companies, they have to obey the censorship laws in order to stay in business, is order not to be shutdown". But this means a huge layout of staff and filtering systems designed to flag problematic posts for follow up, or automatic deletion.

Mainly it's about readership. The sole purpose, it seems obvious to say, of Chinese censorship is to guard against a critical number of people being able to organise around a sole issue, says MacKinnon. "This is the last thing they want", she says, "a Chinese Chalabi emerging".

"The people with big readerships", says MacKinnon, "are going to get found and the blog hosting companies need to worry about them".

Democracy

In particular MacKinnon argues against the assumption that the Internet is by default a democratic force. She says the government has been successful "enough" in implementing an imperfect censorship regime. Sure, it's a technical failure, she says. Any one with web savvy can use a proxy server to get around it. But people don't. And that's telling, says MacKinnon.

"There are a lot of cyber-Utopians in the West that say the Internet is inevitably a democratising force, and what I think is that China is telling us no, the Internet is a neutral technology. And it can be a conduit for democratic change. It can also be a conduit for propaganda. It can be controlled much more than we ever thought".

The Utopic view of the internet in confused by China's specific political situation. The government has enough control of the net to actually skew a great deal of the online world in their favour, says MacKinnon. "There was this assumption early on that the Internet would destroy national borders”, she says. In the case of China, these borders - while still contested and in flux - are continually being fortified by new regulations and government policy.

MacKinnon summarises: "If you look at the whole socio-political context in which it is implemented, it’s successful enough. If you define success as keeping to Communist party in power, which I think is their definition, frankly, then it’s successful. Clearly there’s a lot of worry in the leadership circles that they’ll cease to be successful, and there’s all sorts of regulations that come out all the time”.

Culture

The compromise, the gray area that MacKinnon sees emerging on the Chinese Internet is over the ownership of Chinese culture, not politics. And this, she says, is where the exciting stuff is happening.

“It used to be that in order to become famous in any arena in China you had to get by some kind of government gatekeeper. And now in China, if you’re going to become culturally famous you don’t necessarily have to worry about the fact that no body on the radio’s going to let you go on the radio, and no body’s going to let you go in a magazine and nobody’s going to publish your book”.

MacKinnon argues that most Chinese bloggers - at the least the one's interested in these debates - think that Chinese people need to free their minds first, before they can enjoy free speech, lest the old Party crap is replaced by more mindless ideology. The culture is a good place to start. The government has finally, it seems, lost control of the ability to programme culture into its young. 80 per cent of netizens are under 35.

Most important, I think, is the way MacKinnon paints the Chinese blogger not as an oppressed victim needing the moral outrage of the West in order to be emancipated. Rather she paints them as tenacious optimists, subtly and patiently conditioning their own freedom.

Freedom will come not through US congressional hearings, but through Chinese people's own actions on the Internet. Likewise, censorship will continue, argues MacKinnon, for as long as Chinese people continue themselves to collaborate with the instruments of censorship, both as part of business, and in their own minds.