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If you visit the Democratic China blog from the U.S. you can access it fine. But if you try to access it from within China, you'll get this (click on image to see it more clearly):
The anonymous blogger's initial reaction:
The final sentence in English there requires no translation...
He/she also says in Chinese:
"Please note that I have either entered the blacklist kept by Microsoft employees, or I have been shut down because I triggered their keyword filters.
During the Republican period when one newspaper got shut down, the editor said: "Newspapers that don't get shut down aren't good newspapers, and the editors who don't get beaten aren't good editors. If my blog can attract the attention of the central Communist Party, it must be a good blog."
(I added the wikipedia link to some history about Republican China, before the Communists took over. I talked a bit about the historical parallels between then and now in an article last month, and how history might be repeating itself, despite the Communist Party's best efforts. Are U.S. tech companies ultimately betting on the losing horse?)
In a later post, the blogger concludes that his/her blog was blocked because he/she wrote about and reproduced material from a recently banned publication, Freezing Point. He/she says a lot of MSN Spaces blogs talking about Freezing Point have been blocked.
The blogger has now added to his blog title the URL for a proxy server which Chinese users can use to get through the blockage. Will that proxy server get blocked too? Probably, though there are always other ones for the user who is determined and tech-savvy enough. It seems that the Chinese internet using public must be gaining a greater awareness of proxy servers lately.
Not sure who this blogger is. Trying to find out.
If you're not already completely sick of reading about U.S. corporate responsibility and censorship in China, click here for the transcript of my Tuesday live chat on the Washington Post website. We had some pretty interesting questions. Here are a couple excerpts that touched on things I haven't yet blogged:
Washington, D.C.: Phil Pan mentioned earlier in his discussion that only a minority of blogs are political. Are there many blogs that are anti-American? Does the Chinese government censor such blogs, especially in cases where the blogs may be critical of issues sensitive to the improvement of U.S.-China relations? If yes, for what reasons do you think they might do so?
Rebecca Mackinnon: Greetings!! Great to see so many questions already lined up!!
Yes I think Phil is absolutely right, only a small minority of Chinese blogs are political. Yes, some blogs are anti-American, or more accurately, some bloggers often post opinions on their blogs that are extremely critical of the United States and its motives. I haven't heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China.
Right after September 11, 2001, there weren't really any blogs in China but there were a lot of Chinese chatrooms- and there were a lot of conversations in which Chinese netizens were saying things like "served them right." That was definitely not the official Chinese government policy - which condemned the terrorists. Also, after the Spyplane incident in May 2001, people in Chinese chatrooms were very critical of their government for having handed back the U.S. crew and plane, and saw their government as having been too compromising with the U.S.
So there are definitely parts of Chinese cyberspace that take a much harder line towards the U.S. than the Chinese government does, and it does not appear that these conversations are censored - at least I haven't heard of them being censored.
Further down, I got a question from blogger James Na:
Washington, D.C.: Of the three groups (both internal and external) participating in the discussion about China's future -- the sellouts, the reformers and the revolutionaries ( The Korea Liberator ) -- it seems the greatest dispute is among the reformers and the revolutionaries.
When should the reformers finally cast off the sellouts and join the revolutionaries? Or will the reformers continue to ally with the sellouts, hoping that China would gradually evolve into a democratic-capitalist society?
Rebecca Mackinnon: Hello there! I think you may be implying that I'm a "reformer" and that I should join the "revolutionaries"...
Here's the thing. If there's going to be a revolution, as you hope, it has to come from the Chinese people themselves. It cannot come from some externally-driven "regime change" campaign. The Chinese people are extremely nationalistic and proud. They still have a huge chip on their shoulder about their history of being dominated, occupied, pushed around, and told what to do by foreigners. Successful democracy in China must be a home-grown Chinese democracy, not something imposed on them by Americans or anybody else.
Unfortunately, many Americans who care about human rights issues in China such as myself are seen by people in China as being neo-con regime changers whose hidden agenda is to do an Iraq number on China, or who view China as the inevitable enemy against whom we must ultimately go to war. This is really unfortunate, because it couldn't be further from the case.
James blogged his response to my response. He felt that I misunderstood his question, agreed that change in China must come from within, but thinks that there remains a role for people outside China to help encourage change. As for why Chinese reformers haven't become "revolutionaries," James my short answer is: because they have way too much to lose. Most of the urban intellectuals and pro-reform bureaucrats who favor change have on the whole gained too much materially from 25 years of economic reforms to want to stick their necks out too far. Quite a number of people I know in Beijing who are now very rich businessmen - including some who now run internet companies that comply with censorship requirements - were actually out in the streets protesting in 1989...
The OpenNet Initiative has released a new bulletin today, analyzing the impact of China’s non-commercial website registration regulations on website owners and bloggers, now that the regulations have been in effect for over half a year. The bulletin serves as one of several ongoing updates to ONI's 2005 China Internet filtering report.
The regulations, which were announced last March and took effect in early June of last year, require all non-commercial and personal websites as well as blogs that aren't hosted by a blog-hosting service to obtain a registration number from the authorities. Failure to register makes the site illegal and it can be shut down. (See my June 12, 2005 blog post on the subject here.) As the famed Chinese blogger Isaac Mao explained at the time, bloggers who set up blogs on his hosted service, Blogbus.com, or on rival Bokee.com or MSN Spaces (or one of the many other blog-hosting services) don't have to register because the hosting services have already registered on their behalf. In exchange for this convenience, the blog-hosting services agree to censor and sometimes even delete the blogs of their users. In other words, the government outsources censorship to private business, who censor in a way that's more convenient and a bit more user-friendly than the government's methods. The companies are of course required to do this in exchange for the license to operate their blog-hosting businesses.
So in other words, as a Chinese blogger if you want to stay out of trouble and have a blog that won't be blocked from view inside China, you now have two options: 1. If you're geeky enough, set up your own blog on your own server space, then go through the bureaucratic trouble of getting it registered, giving your real name and address to the authorities, who now know where you live, thus giving you a strong incentive to censor yourself; or, 2. Set up a blog on MSN Spaces, Blogbus, Bokee, Sina or one of the other blog-hosting services, who provide the value-added service of knowing what will get you in trouble better than you probably do, and thus saving you the burden of self-censoring because they'll do it for you. The risk of trusting them to protect you from yourself is of course that one day your blog might simply disappear.
The bulletin concludes:
Overall, ONI believes that the new registration requirement has two key effects that bolster Internet control in China. First, it operates to place Chinese Web site owners on notice that the state is monitoring, and seeks to link them to, Internet content. As blogger Isaac Mao states, registration thus seeks to deter bloggers from posting sensitive materials on their blogs by creating fear about the consequences for so doing.(51) Thus, the state likely seeks to promote blogging as a communications method, but to ensure it operates in a more controlled way.(52) Second, this requirement is another layer in China's multi-modal system of controls over Internet access and content.(53) By creating additional barriers to creating material on-line, and to making it available to the public, the state creates some deterrence and leads Web site owners and bloggers to self-censor what they post. Overall, then, while the new Web site registration requirement is not a major hurdle in itself, it functions as another gear in the sophisticated, widespread, and powerful machinery of state control over the Internet in China.
I gave a talk at Pop!Tech last October about how censorship is being built into Chinese internet business. My notes and powerpoint presentation from the talk are here. You can listen to the whole thing at ITConversations here.
Read my full profile here. This blog is where I (mainly) write about ideas and issues related to my work and research. My Friendfeed micro-blog in the middle column shows what I'm reading and viewing around the web every day, mixed in with my Twitter conversations.
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