Rebecca MacKinnon at CEIP: “Cyber-ocracy vs. Cyber-tarianism: Whatdoes the Internet mean for China?”

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She was there at the beginning of the Internet in China and sawthe promise and peril

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China’s Internet is a real challenge to the cyber-utopians

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But the Internet has particular brought about a loss of cultural control – especially youth culture [shows theChinese Backdorm Boys video]

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The Chinese Internet is actually a rather fun place

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It used to be that if you wanted to be famous (poet, singer,etc.), you had to pass through official gatekeeper. Now,people are just uploading this stuff and making theircareers.

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IMing is the best way to find new material

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While the government has lost control of youth culture,nobody has managed to use the Internet to organize anopposition party or leader. Censorship combined withsurveillance works well enough.

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Two layers of Chinese Internet censorship

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“Outside the great firewall”

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Filters foreign websites

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“Inside the great firewall”

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Deletion of content by companies, primarily

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Take down of websites

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Shutting down of data centers when necessary

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Reminds audience that all website are physically hostedsomewhere, in a legal jurisdiction

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Shows a map of the Internet – comes from outside, travelsthrough 7 points, is distributed through ISPs and then towebsites

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Those 7 chokepoint routers are where the blockageof GFW occurs – and returns 404s

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Online service providers (Google, etc.) are required tomodify sites (i.e. delete Tiananmen massacre pictures)

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Google.cn censors far less than Baidu

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Chinese government expects (and mandates) .cn sites toself-police

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Tianya, Sina(blog hosts) and others either refuse to publishor delete sensitive posts, but the results are not universal –the companies are doing the censorship after receiving adirective from the government. [See her First Mondayarticle]

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Censorship amounts is a political/business tool usedagainst competitors

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There is a certain amount of choice in howenthusiastically companies are going to respond togovernment orders

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But because crisis news breaks unofficially, the official media isnow reporting the stuff more. But the citizen reports are stillcensored.

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So they have to be sneaky – use symbols – but this isn’treally deliberation

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Acting out frustration about censorship by creating weird jokes with photoshop and videos

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Some of this is really edgy – Alpaca Sheep video inMandarin becomes very obscene based on intonation

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She is showing many, many examples of round-aboutpolitical commentary

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There is a mentality that “if we bring down the “Iron Curtain 2.0,”China will change and democratize”

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Danwei.org blogger thinks this is wrong; he thinks it iscloser to “net nanny”

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Or perhaps it’s closer to hydro-electric management –don’t control all of it, just control enough

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Or is it “cyber civil war 2.0” – the follow-up to the CulturalRevolution where liberals and nationalists battle it out

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Hu Jintao has reached out to netizens to see what they thinkabout things

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Yongnian Zheng wrote a book called “Authoritarian Deliberation”– China is not more democratic, but more deliberative

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Chinese feel that they have more recourse withoutresorting to elections, etc.

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The Central Party might last longer because peopledon’t need to go into the streets when they havegrievances

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There is a robust online police force (30,000? 50,000?)

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Panopticon

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Identity theft, cybercrime, hacking and child safety are allconcerns in China, too, and the police are presented as anantidote to this

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There is a great deal of cyber-nationalism – not everyone iswaiting for Western values to come and rescue them

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Anti-CNN site after Tibet unrest coverage; had a lot of fairpoints about inaccurate or biased reporting. Those feelingshave a lot of currency in Chinese populations at home andabroad

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We are seeing a growing number of “Internet grassroots” –feeling empowered and meeting in person (4

Annual ChineseBloggerCon)

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Emergent networked civil society

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Isaac Mao: “If we want free speech, first we need free thinking.”– more practice debating without kneejerk reactions and lack of plurality

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Sharism: not socialism, but sharing knowledge/ideasthrough communities formed online where collectivelearning, critical thinking and public discourse lead toemergent democracy. But need capacity building

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Should the Internet be a “Special Political Zone”?

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Some grassroots organizations for causes such as homelessness(ridiculously easy organization a la Shirky)

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Lawyers are starting to use Internet to spread information aboutthe cases they are working on or find important to civil rights inChina

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Ends with some Daoism – stop framing the ‘net in terms of Western valuesQ&A

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Gaurav – even in Western countries, there is more and morecensorship of the Internet. Is this a trend internationally beyondChina?

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Rebecca: are we going to meet in the middle or willauthoritarian => democracy. We are increasinglyentrusting everything to online service providers – is thatgoing to be a transparent layer? That is a question for allcountries

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Because Vietnam is coming to this later, it is going to be harderfor them to crack down – GNI and China blocked early enoughthat a critical mass didn’t get on to foreign blog hosts, they couldthen police the domestic ones.

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There have been some limits to the growth of circumventiontools because people are scared or novices

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US Government should support circumvention tools.Circumvention on its own is not the answer – that is Iron Curtain2.0 thought – China is much more participatory

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Susan Weld of GU Law – are virtual NGOs controlled?

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Rebecca: they are so distributed that you can’t reallycontrol them. But this makes them less than effective, too.My unresolved Qs:-Censorship as a trade barrier