Big Mama's Field of View

The Present and Future of Internet Control in China

Jared Friedman

January 2006China’s Two Social RevolutionsTF: Dian Yang

Abstract

Both in the Western news media and in the academic literature there has beenmuch debate on what effect the free information flow that we associate with the internetwill have on China, and on whether China can effectively censor the internet. This articlereviews arguments that have been made on both sides and considers additional technicaland survey data in an attempt to come to some resolution on the issue. Novel data oncurrent blocking techniques is collected using proxy servers. These novel results showthat simple methods of evading internet controls in China exist today. I conclude,however, that unless a couple of somewhat speculative technologies are developed, Chinashould, given sufficient intent and investment in technology, be able to nearly eliminatethe amount of unwanted information viewed online.

A Brief History of Internet Filtering in China

Since the very beginning of the availability of internet access in China in 1994,the Chinese government has attempted to control and filter internet access. (“InternetFiltering in China”, 2005) Considering that China has always exerted strict controls over available information and that the internet is basically just another source of information,this is hardly surprising. In fact, China initially totally rejected the internet, and onlycame to gradually tolerate it when it became clear that one, the internet was here to stayand there wasn’t anything China could do about that (Endeshaw, 2004) and two, that itseemed possible to control the internet much as other forms of communication had beencontrolled (Gutmann, 20002). According to Article 5 of the 1997 regulations (taken fromSohmen, 2001), which provide one of the more extensive lists of outlawed content, the prohibited content includes all material which is:i. Subversive of state power or the socialist systemii. Damaging to national unityiii. Inciting discrimination between nationalitiesiv. Disturbing to social order v. Propagating feudal superstitionvi. Pornography, gambling or violencevii. Insulting or libelousviii. Violating the Constitution or other lawsClearly, this casts a fairly wide net. China has a number of ways of implementing these prohibitions. The first line of defense has become known, somewhat derisively, as theGreat Firewall of China (

Barm

, 1997)

. The firewall works primarily by having stateworkers scour the internet for objectionable content on servers outsides of China and addcertain sites to a country-wide black-list. The intention is that when people in China tryto visit these sites, they receive an error saying the page could not be found and areunable to access the blocked content.From both a political and technological perspective, the reason that China wasable to implement the firewall easily is that providing internet access to China (as to anyother country) requires the construction of certain very expensive telecommunications

equipment (primarily routers, switches, and fiber optic lines) to connect the network inChina to the broader internet outside of China. There are currently only nine operators of such interconnecting networks

(“Internet Filtering in China”, 2005), of which the biggestare China Telecom, China Netcom, China Science and Technology Network, and ChinaUnicom (Tan, 1999). All international connections must go through theseinterconnecting networks, and despite rumors of illicit cables running from Hong Kong toGuangzhou

(Gutmann, 2002), secret illegal connections would be extremely difficult to build. Thus, the government’s firewall need be implemented only at the routers of thosenine operators, which is quite simple to organize.The second line of defense against prohibited content is monitoring. No oneknows the extent or architecture of the Chinese monitoring apparatus, because unlikefiltering, which can be directly observed, there is no way for researchers to see what is being monitored. According to Amnesty International, at least 54 people wereimprisoned in 2003 for internet crimes detected through China’s internet monitoringapparatus(“Controls Tighten”, 2004), and it is likely that this significantly understates thetrue figure. There are several possible types of monitoring. The simplest is to findobjectionable public websites or blogs run by people in China and trace these back to theactual individuals. All of Amnesty International’s 54 prisoners for which there wassufficient information appear to have been caught this way. The more sophisticated typeof monitoring is to watch all of a user’s internet browsing and email traffic. There is littledoubt that China has some capabilities along these lines, but the details are unknown.Monitoring of the internet is not useful to the Chinese authorities unless they canconnect content they find with actual people to arrest. As late as 2002, there were about200,000 internet Cafés in China, some of which were open 24 hours a day, and whoseclientele consisted almost entirely of teenagers and young adults (Endeshaw, 2004).Rules supposedly required clients to register with the managers of the cafés and to produce valid ID’s, but such rules were apparently routinely ignored (Neumann, 2001).Without a record of who was using what computer, illegal content that passed throughcomputers in cafés could not be traced back to anyone. However, times have changed.The situation was ripe for a crackdown, and helped along by the convenient excuse of afire in an internet café in Beijing in June 2002 which reportedly killed 24 people, theauthorities placed strict new regulations in place. Thousands of cafés have been shutdown all over the country (“Internet Filtering in China”, 2005). Internet cafés must nowclose by midnight, restrict access by minors, and most importantly, must have all patronsregister by ID on entry and keep records of who was using what computer for 60 days.It is not easy to use home internet connections anonymously anymore, either. A1996 law requires all users of the internet from home to register with the Ministry of Public Security within 30 days of making a connection. The Measures for ManagingInternet Information Services, issued in 2000, requires that ISPs track the IP addressesassigned to their customers and keep records of all websites visited for 60 days (Tsui,2001). With these records, it should usually be a simple matter for authorities to tracedetected illegal activity back to an IP address, and from that to an individual.