Censorship Foreigners Don't See - Stuff that didn't fit in my Op-Ed

China's system of filtering websites by blocking web addresses and keywords of overseas websites has come to be known as the "Great Firewall."  (No that is not it's official name - I believe the term was first coined by some frustrated bloggers.) But the GFW, for short, is only a small part of Chinese Internet censorship.

Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall is only one small part of Chinese Internet censorship."

My Op-ed in today's Asian Wall Street Journal, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don't See, is an effort to get people to get beyond what Internet scholar Lokman Tsui describes as a Western fixation on "Iron Curtain 2.0" which blinds most Western observers to the realities of the Chinese Internet - and to China more generally, for that matter. 

Back in June I wrote a post explaining how we need to get beyond the "wall" metaphor in order to understand Chinese Internet censorship properly. People at this year's Chinese Internet Research Conference suggested "Net Nanny" or even "Hydroelectric Management" are better metaphors for how speech is controlled on the Chinese Internet. But they're just not as sexy-sounding somehow, and lack the same nifty Soviet-era-with-Chinese-flavor overtones.

While I'm at it, another pet peeve. Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall does not equal the Golden Shield Project. The Great Firewall is only a subset of the Golden Shield."

The filtering system we call the Great Firewall is only a very small part of the official Golden Shield Project (pdf), the official goverment name for a a national initiative spanning digital surveillance, better communications and data sharing among law enforcement and security agencies, data mining, general use of ICT to improve Chinese law enforcement and national security - as broadly defined by all the relevant departments, ministries, etc. Censorship is one small part of the digital efforts to protect "national security" from the perspective of those in charge.

But that's for another long rant some other time, I digress. Since my WSJ op-ed was limited to 600 words and could not contain my usual blog links, screenshots, quotations, and so forth, I thought I'd share a few more details here that relate to the examples of censorship I gave in the article.

In the piece I described the results of some tests I conducted this week as part of my research project looking at how Chinese blog-hosting companies censor their users' content.

Over the past week I've been posting a variety of Olympics-related content onto accounts set up on 16 different Chinese blog-hosting platforms to see what content gets censored, by which platforms, and how. A small band of badly-paid masochists and I have been doing these kinds of tests on and off since the beginning of the year - once we've got enough results to draw conclusions, I'll do some follow-on research then write up my findings for an academic paper. So far, I'm finding censorship on blog-hosting services to be common and wide-ranging and there is huge variation on who censors what. Many services over-compensate to stay out of trouble, which combined with inexact automated censorship systems, results in frequent censorship of things you can find on Xinhua.

In the article, I cite two tests, one on Sina and another on the Baidu blogging system. Here's the text I posted, taken from the BBC Chinese website (which is not currently blocked by the Great Firewall at least in some parts of China) about the knife attack against two Americans and their Chinese guide in Beijing over the weekend, and which was almost entirely based on Chinese state media reports:

鼓楼杀美游客事件“属个人行为”
据中国媒体报道，中国浙江警方经调查后认定，8月9日在北京鼓楼持刀杀害美国游客并跳楼自杀的凶手唐永明因对生活失去信心而迁怒社会，属个人极端行为。警 方说，唐永明没有犯罪前科，出事前也未发现有任何异常。47岁的唐永明经历过两次婚姻和几次恋爱失败，之后变得性格孤僻，脾气暴躁。警方说，唐永明原为杭 州某企业职工，后买断工龄辞职，并两次拒绝政府所安排的就业机会。据中国媒体报道，唐永明溺爱他21岁的儿子，对其寄予厚望，甚至卖掉自己的房产，将房款 20余万全部交给儿子。

You'd think that something like this wouldn't be censored given that the GFW isn't blocking it, and it's not saying anything beyond what you can find around the Chinese web from news websites. But you'd be wrong.

Sina and Baidu were playing their censorship system so conservative that Sina took down my post after a few hours and Baidu wouldn't even let me publish it. Here's the error message at the url where my Sina post had briefly resided (click image for full error message page):


It says "Sorry, the blog address you visited doesn't exist."

And here's what happened on Baidu, when I pressed "publish:"



It says: "Sorry, your article failed to be published. The article contains inappropriate content, please check."



Yahoo! China censored it too (click image to see original error page):


Lots of apologies and links to various help pages, but no hint that the reason why you're landing on this error page might be because the post was censored.


Even more amusing, this Xinhuanet article, about President Hu Jintao's pre-Olympics pep talk telling everybody to "put on a good Olympics" was censored by iFeng (the blog platform of Phoenix TV), and Mop (a property of Oak Pacific, recipient of much U.S. venture capital). Mop gave me this error message:

"Apologies, your article has been put into the blog recycling station, please correct it then publish again."

I find it pretty common for blog-hosting platforms to censor Communist Party propaganda material about Chinese leaders. Do the regulators instructing them assume that all mentions of China's leaders are likely to be negative or sarcastic?

Then, many are. Take the political joke censored by China mobile, which I also mentioned in my article. Here's blogger "deerfang"'s description of what happened:

Last night, my friend were telling me some political jokes that were circulating through cell text messaging. The joke involves current Chinese president and Mao. He showed me story on his phone and tried to forward it to my phone. Strange thing happened. My phone received the message but in blank saying “Missing Text”. We realize these kind of text messages might be censored now in China because of certain keywords. The one my firend received were back in May. We tried to send the joke a few more times and also tried someone else’ phone, but never succeeded.

Here is the original joke (third paragraph down), which, in addition to doing the rounds on mobile SMS has also done the rounds on the web - censorship is patchy enough that if you're taken down in one place you can usually find a home for the material somewhere else - though it may be in a corner of the web where fewer people surf. The joke doesn't translate very well, but the gist of it is that President Hu Jintao, at his wits' end about what to do with all the crises happening around the nation, goes to see Mao - lying preserved under glass in his mausoleum - and asks for advice. Mao offers to trade places with Hu and to go out and kick some foreign behind, frighten all the foreigners and put them in their place by making them take a ridiculous series of Chinese tests. Or something like that. It's (slightly) better in Chinese...

The point is, nothing revolutionary or particularly brilliant in there. I've heard much crazier and nastier political jokes - like the one about Li Peng switching private parts with Deng Xiaoping at Deng's wake, or the one about Deng and Thatcher doing the nasty.

The joke was censored on China Mobile most likely because it mentions Hu Jintao, which they have probably entered as a keyword for blocking.

That implies an assumption by China Mobile that any Chinese person who mentions their president on mobile SMS is more likely than not to have bad things to say...

Comments

[Sebastian Bassi]

There is something I don't understand: What response do you receive when you ask an explanation why a SMS you sent is received as a blank message. What about contacting your ISP an asking for an explanation on why a URL you know exists, it says it is now available.
What are the official response about all this?

[Li Peng's Little Brother]

I'm willing to bet 50 cents that the name of Chinese gold medal gymnast "He Kexin" will soon prompt similar overreaction from the Chinese government censors, who still haven't cleaned up all of the domestic references stating her age as 14.

[charles liu]

The attack at the drum tower can be easily Baidu'd:

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%CC%C6%D3%C0%C3%F7

by using the assailant's name.

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

@Charles, that was exactly the point in the op-ed I wrote: the attack could be searched in Baidu with lots of results, but Baidu blogs censor bloggers from writing about it.

@sebastian, the point is that the url no longer exists because the blog host took the whole thing down. It's not filtered - it's removed. Officially, there is no response. The service providers refuse to answer questions about these things. Last year a blogger tried to sue his blog host for censoring his posts - claiming breach of contract since he hadn't posted anything his user agreement said he couldn't - and the court threw out the case. The hosting company was never forced to give a substantive explanation.

[jimmy howe]

love the countdown clock, is rather bi-parté-san.

[donchai]

Well, partly, I agree with your argument about the conser problem in China. However, there is two things should be comtemplated: For one thing,Not all chinese people are promoted a good education. 90% of them can not think reasonablly and critically. Most of people surfing on net may just aggrandize the truth of particial even or weave other story to mislead more people whom should be more care about their life but polities. For another, indisputablly, there indeed are so much dengrous crisis around china. However, Hu juntao as the leader of chinese goverment should not be took all responsibility for that.
Maybe you should know more about china and understand why people and goverment do all these thing but just pay your own judgement on such even by your native view. Sometimes, it is called prejudgement.

[Han solo]

As I was searching through WWW, I came upon this article by the name of Matteo Ricci:On Chinese Government, Selection from his Journals (1583-1610 CE). http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/ric-jour.html
After I have read through it,I am very sad, because 400 years ago, Italian Jesuit priest went to China to spread the words of Christ, and instead, he was witnessing a kind of true freedom of speech and democracy.

Quote:"Numerous copies are made of such written documents submitted to the crown and of the answers made to them In this way, what goes on in the royal headquarters is quickly communicated to every corner of the country. " Unquoted.

For 400 years, Chinese are seem to be stuck in a perpetual time vortex, unable to get out.May be for another 400 years?

More quotes:"Besides the classes or orders of the magistrates already described and many others which we shall pass over because they differ but little from our own, there are two special orders never heard of among our people. These are the Choli and the- Zauli, each consisting of sixty or more chosen philosophers. all prudent men arid tried. who have -already given exceptional proof of their fidelity to the King and to the realm. These two orders are reserved by the King for business of greater moment pertaining to the royal court or to the provinces, and by him they are entrusted with the great responsibility of carrying with it both respect and authority. They correspond in some manner to what we would call keepers of the public conscience, inasmuch as they inform the King as often as they see fit, of any infraction of the law in any part of the entire kingdom. No one is spared from their scrutiny, even the highest magistrates, as they do not hesitate to speak, even though it concerns the King himself or his household. If they had the power of doing something more than talking, or rather of writing, and if they were not wholly dependent upon the King whom they admonish, their particular office would correspond to that of the Lacedemonian Ephors. And yet they do their duty so thoroughly that they are a source of wonder to outsiders and a good example for imitation. Neither King nor magistrates can escape their courage and frankness, and even when they arouse the royal wrath to such an extent that the king becomes severely angry with them they will never desist from their admonitions and criticism until some remedy has been applied to the public evil against which they are inveighing. In fact. when the grievance is particularly acute they are sure to put a sting into their complaints and to show no partiality where crown or courts are concerned. This same privilege of offering written criticism is also granted by law to any magistrate and even to a private citizen, but for the most part it is exercised only by those to whose particular office it pertains. Numerous copies are made of such written documents submitted to the crown and of the answers made to them In this way, what goes on in the royal headquarters is quickly communicated to every corner of the country. These documents are also compiled in book form, and whatever of their content is deemed worthy of handing down to posterity is transcribed into the annals of the king's regime. Unquoted.

[Han solo]

Yesterday I said I was very sad, after reading Matteo Ricci's The Diary of Matthew Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century,( New York: Random House, 1942, 1970). I was sad because during Ming Dynasty, China was strong, socially and politically advance (compared to other nations in her times), to such an extent that great scholar like Matteo Ricci gave her very high marks. In those time, Ming Dynasty was the envy of the World.
600 years had gone, what had happen? China, on any international plateform, is finding it tough to have real friends. (excluding countries such as N. Korea, Cuba, Sudan, of course.) Why?

Today I came upon an article which made me angry.
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_571ca5930100909p.html#cmt_707166

It is about 金庸. For those westerners who do not know much about Chinese history, 金庸 is a multi-Millionaire now, and he was the ex-owner of 明报, famous Hong Kong newspaper.

Quote:"也许在金庸这样的奴才看来，朱元璋等明朝皇帝杀的是所谓开国功臣达官贵人，所以是暴虐，而满清杀的大量平民则不算人，或者生命的价值比起达官贵人来低一等，所以是仁慈，卑劣至此可以令人无言" Unquoted.

The above accusation is made by this blogger 杜車别, kind of self-appointed historian.Most of his blogs were presenting his side of the argument: (1) Ming Dynasty was the best and the most powerful dynasty in Chinese history.
(2) Manchu rulers were a bunch of barbarians, they carried out genocide on Han 汉族.
(3) 金庸 were fabricating big lies about Ming 明朝 in all of his popular novels such as 神雕俠侣, and many others, which had been turned into countless movies and TV dramas. Put it this way,(for those who had just came from Mars, who had no idea who 金庸 is) Mao Tse-tung and 金庸, if any Chinese web site is going to conduct an opinion poll on popularity between the two, 金庸 will win hands down.
After reading 杜車别 blogs, I am beginning to form different opinions.
Why I am angry, you may ask. I used to love his novels, I loved most of the characters in his novels. Now I am not too sure. That is why I am very angry.
And I a not alone.

[Han solo]

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_571ca5930100909p.html#cmt_707166

Like I said yesterday, I was angry at 杜車别 ,because he shattered my "Childhood dreams".
Let me explain. I am an oversea Chinese 漢族, Han, and had read lots of classical Chinese novels such as 三國, 西游, and of course Mr.金庸 笑傲江湖, 倚天屠龍, nearly all of his novels. And all the main characters were my childhood hero, such as 張无忌, 虚竹和尚, 金毛獅王, 韋小宝.All these guys were mr.Nobody at the beginning, and were constantly bullied by nasty thugs, until one day they had learned some kind of kungfu, then "open sesame", they have everything, money, social status, girls, not any girls, but the prettiest, with the best temperament, sometimes a Mongol princess.
As a child, I was very much living through this virtual world created by Mr. 金庸, and one day I was 張无忌, the next day , 韋小宝, and wondering why none of my female classmates were even comparable to girls like 阿朱,趙明. And I was proud of this childhood of mine, very much so.
Now this Mr. 杜車别 turned up, saying thins like Mr.金庸 had got it all wrong! What a bombshell.Mr. 杜車别 is saying, in his blogs, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_571ca5930100909p.html#cmt_707166, in those novels, the Manchu rulers being presented as benevolent,and open minded persons, and Ming emperors were presented as tyrants, murderers, were all wrong.Not only wrong,it is the other way around.
Now this is why I am angry.Because I can no longer tell right from wrong.

[Dan]

Interesting post, can you comment on what anonymity and privacy measures (if any) are effective to address this problem?
Are programs such as Freenet, Tor, I2P and others a viable solution?
Thanks