China, campeã mundial

China was one of the first repressive regimes to realise it couldn’t do without the Internet and so it had to be brought under control. It’s one of the few countries that’ve managed to block all material that criticises the regime while expanding Internet facilities.

What’s the big secret? A clever mix of investment, technology and diplomacy.

Beijing has spent tens of millions of dollars on the most sophisticated Internet filtering and surveillance equipment. The system is based on a constantly-updated blacklist of websites. Access to “subversive” ones – a very broad notion that includes pornography, political criticism and sites that are pro-Tibet or favour Taiwanese independence – is then blocked at the level of the country’s Internet “backbones” (major connection nodes). But censorship doesn’t stop there and the regime can automatically bar access to sites in which “dubious” keywords, or combinations such as “tianamen” + “massacre,” are spotted.

The regime can also censor online discussion forums almost instantly. State-of-the-art software and a cyber-police thought to number tens of thousands have enabled it to gut online forums (very active in recent years) of virtually all political dissent. A call for free elections, for example, has a maximum online life of about half an hour. The ministry of industry and information has also zeroed in on blogs and done a deal with Chinabased blog platforms to censor users. So a post about the Dalai Lama will appear online full of automatically-inserted blank spaces in place of “illegal” words.

But how did China get hold of such advanced and effective censorship equipment when only a decade ago the country had no major Internet firms? With the help of big US companies, led by Cisco. These firms, to get a slice of the enormous Chinese market of already more than 100 million people online, have closed their eyes to how their technology is being used. Some have probably worked directly with the regime to set up filters and surveillance.

Beijing has even got the world’s major search-engines to go on bended knee. Yahoo! agreed a few years ago to remove all material offensive to the regime from its Chinese version. For a long time, Google refused but now seems to be moving in the same direction.

The country’s police and courts also treat very harshly website editors who don’t obey the rules laid down by the governing Communist Party. 75 cyber-dissidents are currently in prison for trying to post independent news online, some of them serving sentences of more than 10 years.

So before you set up a blog in China, it’s best to find out what the rules are. Bloggers living in the country holding the world online censorship title have to be cautious and crafty.

FOnte: PDF (Handbook for Bloggers and cyber-dissidents)