Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China

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Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. In accordance with these laws, more than sixty Internet regulations have been made by the People's Republic of China government, and censorship systems are implemented variously by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations.^[1]^[2] The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems, so censorship does not apply there.

The escalation of the government's effort to neutralise critical online opinion comes after a series of large anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-corruption protests, many of which were organised or publicised using instant messaging services, chatrooms and text messages. Although the existence of an internet police task force, estimated at more than 30,000,^[3]^[4] has been known for some time, attention is mostly focused on their work as censors and monitors. Countless critical comments appearing on internet forums, bulletin boards, blogs, vlogs or any major portals such as Sohu and Sina are usually erased within minutes.

1 Enforcement
2 Golden Shield Project
- 2.1 Technical information
- 2.2 Censored content
3 Self-censorship
4 Recent developments
5 Reactions
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Enforcement

The banning appears to be mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc, with some sites being blocked and similar sites being allowed or even blocked in one city and allowed in another.^[5] The blocks have been often lifted for special occasions. One example was the New York Times which was unblocked when reporters in a private interview with Jiang Zemin specifically asked about the block and he replied that he would look into the matter. During the APEC summit in Shanghai during 2001, normally-blocked media sources such as CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post suddenly became accessible. Since 2001, the content controls have been further relaxed on a permanent basis, and all three of the sites previously mentioned are now accessible from mainland China. In fact, most foreign news organizations' web sites are accessible, though a small number (including the BBC) continue to be blocked.

Mainland China agencies frequently issue regulations about the Internet, but these are often not enforced or are ignored. One major problem in enforcement is determining who has jurisdiction over the Internet, causing many bureaucratic turf battles within the PRC government among various ministries and between central and local officials. The State Council Information Office has the mandate to regulate the Internet, but other security agencies in mainland China have a say as well.

Some legal scholars have pointed out that the frequency at which the PRC government issues new regulations on the Internet is a symptom of their ineffectiveness because the new regulations never make reference to the previous set of regulations, which appear to have been forgotten.

[edit] Golden Shield Project

Main article: Golden Shield Project

The Golden Shield Project (Chinese: 金盾工程; pinyin: jīndùn gōngchéng) is owned by Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China (MPS). It started in 1998, began the process in November of 2003, and the first part of the project passed the national inspection on November 16, 2006 in Beijing. According to MPS, it is to construct a communication network and computer information system for police to improve their capability and efficiency. According to China Central Television (CCTV), up to 2002, the preliminary work of the Golden Shield Project cost US$800 million (equivalent to RMB 6,400 million or €640 million).^[6]

It may be known outside mainland China as the Great Firewall of China (in reference both to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China). The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways. The system also selectively engages in DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested. The government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical.^[7]

[edit] Technical information

Some commonly used methods for censoring content are:^[8]

IP blocking. Access to a certain IP address is denied. If the target website is hosted in a shared hosting server, all websites on the same server will be blocked. This affects all IP protocols such as HTTP, FTP or POP. A typical circumvention method is to find proxies that have access to the target websites, but proxies may be jammed or blocked, and some websites, such as Wikipedia, also block proxies. Some large websites like Google have allocated additional IP addresses to circumvent the block, but later the block was extended to cover the new IPs.
DNS filtering and redirection. Don't resolve domain names, or return incorrect IP addresses. This affects all IP protocols such as HTTP, FTP or POP. A typical circumvention method is to find a domain name server that resolves domain names correctly, but domain name servers are subject to blockage as well, especially IP blocking. Another workaround is to bypass DNS if the IP address is obtainable from other sources and is not blocked. Examples are modifying the Hosts file or typing the IP address instead of the domain name in an Web browser.
URL filtering. Scan the requested Uniform Resource Locator (URL) string for target keywords regardless of the domain name specified in the URL. This affects the HTTP protocol. Typical circumvention methods are to use escaped characters in the URL, or to use encrypted protocols such as VPN and SSL.^[9]
Packet filtering. Terminate TCP packet transmissions when a certain amount of controversial keywords are detected. This affects all TCP protocols such as HTTP, FTP or POP, but Search engine pages are more likely to be censored. Typical circumvention methods are to use encrypted protocols such as VPN and SSL, to escape the HTML content, or reducing the TCP/IP stack's size thus reduce the amount of text contained in a given packet.
Connection reset. If a previous TCP connection is blocked by the filter, future connection attempts from both sides will also be blocked for up to 30 minutes. Depending on the location of the block, other users or websites may be also blocked if the communication are routed to the location of the block. A circumvention method is to ignore the reset packet sent by the firewall.^[10]

[edit] Censored content

See also: List of notable websites blocked in the People's Republic of China

Research into mainland Chinese Internet censorship has shown that censored websites include:

Websites belonging to outlawed groups, such as Falun Gong
News sources that often cover some taboo topics such as police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, and Marxist sites.^[11] These sites include Voice of America, BBC News, and Yahoo! Hong Kong
Sites related with Taiwan government, media, or other organizations, including sites dedicated to religious content, such as CBETA, a site that provides the complete Chinese Buddhist canon
Web sites that contain obscenity, pornography and criminal activity
Sites linked with the Dalai Lama and his International Tibet Independence Movement, including his teachings

Blocked websites are indexed to a lesser degree, if at all, by some Chinese search engines, such as Baidu and Google China. This sometimes has considerable impact on search results.^[12] According to a Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites are blocked from within mainland China.^[13] According to The New York Times, Google has set up computer systems inside China that try to access Web sites outside the country. If a site is inaccessible, then it is added to Google China's blacklist.^[14] However, once unblocked, the websites will be reindexed.

[edit] Self-censorship

[edit] Search engines

See also: List of words censored by search engines in the People's Republic of China

One part of the block is to filter the search results of certain terms on Chinese search engines. These Chinese search engines include both international ones (for example, yahoo.com.cn and Google China) as well as domestic ones (for example, Baidu). Attempting to search for censored keywords in these Chinese search engines will yield few or no results. Google.cn will display the following at the bottom of the page: "According to the local laws, regulations and policies, part of the searching result is not shown."

In addition, a connection containing intensive censored terms may also be closed by The Great Firewall, and cannot be reestablished for several minutes. This affects all network connections including HTTP and POP, but the reset is more likely to occur during searching.

Before the search engines censored themselves, many search engines had been blocked, namely Google and AltaVista.^[15] Technorati, a search engine for blogs, has been blocked.^[16]

[edit] Cernet

Several Bulletin Board Systems in universities were closed down or restricted public access since 2004, including the SMTH BBS and the YTHT BBS.^[17]

[edit] Local businesses

Although blocking foreign sites has received much attention in the West, this is actually only a part of the PRC effort to censor the Internet. Although the government rarely practices this, much more effective is the ability to censor content providers within mainland China, as the ISPs and other service providers are restricting customers' actions for fear of being found legally liable for customers' conduct. The service providers have assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers.

Although the government does not have the physical resources to monitor all Internet chat rooms and forums, the threat of being shut down has caused Internet content providers to employ internal staff, colloquially known as "big mamas", who stop and remove forum comments which may be politically sensitive. In Shenzhen, these duties are partly taken over by a pair of police-created cartoon characters, Jingjing and Chacha, who help extend the online 'police presence' of the Shenzhen authorities.

However, Internet content providers have adopted some counter-strategies. One is to go forth posting politically sensitive stories and removing them only when the government complains. In the hours or days in which the story is available online, people read it, and by the time the story is taken down, the information is already public. One notable case in which this occurred was in response to a school explosion in 2001, when local officials tried to suppress the fact the explosion resulted from children illegally producing fireworks. By the time local officials forced the story to be removed from the Internet, the news had already been widely disseminated.

In addition, Internet content providers often replace censored forum comments with white space which allows the reader to know that comments critical of the authorities had been submitted, and often to guess what they might have been.

[edit] International corporations

One controversial issue is whether foreign companies should supply equipment which assists in the blocking of sites to the PRC government. Some argue that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship including restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Others argue that equipment being supplied, from companies such as the American based Cisco Systems Inc., is standard Internet infrastructure equipment and that providing this sort of equipment actually aids the flow of information, and that the PRC is fully able to create its own infrastructure without Western help. By contrast, human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders argue that if companies would stop contributing to the authorities' censorship efforts the government could be forced to change.

A similar dilemma faces foreign content providers such as Yahoo!, AOL, Google and Skype who abide by PRC government wishes, including having internal content monitors, in order to be able to operate within mainland China. Also, in accordance with mainland Chinese laws, Microsoft began to censor the content of its blog service Windows Live Spaces, arguing continuing to provide Internet services is more beneficial to the Chinese.^[18] Michael Anti, whose blog on Windows Live Spaces was removed by Microsoft, agreed that the Chinese are better off with Windows Live Spaces than without it.^[19]

Sites that host software that can be used to circumvent the censorship, such as Freenet and Peek-a-Booty, are also banned. (For some time, this included the entire open source software repository at SourceForge, as it hosts the Freenet project, among thousands of others.)

[edit] Recent developments

In 2003, Internet activists and journalists led an online uprising that eventually forced the abolishment of the Custody and repatriation procedure, and the establishment of constitutional committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.^[20]

On July 11, 2003, the PRC government granted licenses to open Internet cafe chains. The licenses were awarded to 10 firms, including three affiliated to the PRC Ministry of Culture: China Audio-Visual Publishing House, which plans to set up 50,000 cafes in 40 cities in three years, the China Cultural Relics Information Center and the China National Library. A fourth operator, China Youth Net, is affiliated with the politically powerful Central Committee of China Youth League. The other six include state-owned telecoms operators such as China United Telecommunications Corporation, parent of China Unicom Ltd, Great Wall Broadband Network Service Co Ltd, or Internet service providers such as www.readchina.com, which belongs to Read Investment Holdings Co., a high-tech conglomerate founded in 1988 which has annual revenues of 10 billion yuan. Business analysts and foreign Internet operators regard the licenses as intended to clamp down on information deemed harmful to the PRC government.

In the summer of 2005, the PRC purchased over 200 routers from an American company, Cisco Systems that will allow the PRC government a more advanced technological censoring ability.^[21]

On October 18, 2005, the PRC government restarted its policy of blocking access to Wikipedia.^[22]

On February 14, 2006, a group of former senior Communist party officials in China criticized the Internet censorship, stating that strict censorship may "sow the seeds of disaster" for China's political transition.^[23] On the next day, a government spokesman responded that its rules are "fully in line" with the rest of the world and that "no one had been arrested just for writing online content."^[24]

In February 2006, Google made a significant concession to the Great Firewall, in exchange for equipment installation on Chinese soil, by blocking websites which the Chinese Government deemed illegal.^[25] TIME magazine reported that Google protests that it is in a tough situation but says it ultimately has to obey local laws.

On March 8, 2006, two popular Chinese blogs shut themselves down to observe the International Women's Day and to protest their opinion that reporting on their blogs by Western media disproportionally focused on censorship. Reporters Without Borders, BBC, Reuters and Voice of America were misled by the ambiguous shutdown notice and reported without validation.^[26]

In May 2006, Chinese Internet users encountered difficulties when connecting to Hotmail, a popular email service provided by Microsoft. Although Microsoft stated that the reason was a technical issue, many media reported their speculation and linked the event to Internet censorship.^[27]^[28]

Still in May 2006, users have been reporting problems accessing POP mailboxes in many big mail providers (although POP-over-SSL works fine). In the last week of May, Google and many of its services became unreachable. It is as yet unconfirmed whether these are instances of blocking, or something else.

In July 2006, researchers at Cambridge University claim to have defeated the firewall by ignoring the TCP reset packets.^[29]

On August 7, 2006, some Wikipedians in China found they cannot access Wikipedia via some proxy tools. Wikimedia proxy services in the United States and in Korea have been masked by the Great Firewall. And the blocking has been enforced to URL-level because if users in China link to the URL addresses of Wikipedia (all languages), Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimania 2006 and Chinese Wikimedia Conference 2006 websites, users will get the "connection has been reset" error. Some Wikipedians in China believe this might be related with a two-page news story entitled "Wikipedia-maniac.",^[30]^[31] which appeared in the August 6 issue of the Beijing News (新京報).

As of (at least) September 27, 2006, Blogspot blogs (which had been blocked previously) can be accessed within China.

As of (at least) October 10, 2006, English Mediawiki sites can be accessed even without a proxy in China, though Chinese sites were reported to be blocked. The secure server, on the other hand, cannot, for whatever reason, be accessed. Some China Telecom users report access to the larger part of Wikipedia, including pages regarding Taiwan, but not other more politically sensitive pages. This article is accessible as of October 26, 2006 from Beijing. The Chinese government has currently decided to permit access to the English Wikipedia although some areas are not accessible in the PRC.

According to Reporters without Borders, the Chinese language version of Wikipedia was unblocked around November 13, 2006.^[32]

According to the Associated Press, both Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia were again inaccessible on November 17, 2006. They report: "It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site." For more information, see Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China.

On January 24, 2007, Chinese state media reported that Hu Jintao had vowed to "purify" the Internet. Hu apparently made no specific mention of censorship, saying China needed to "strengthen administration and development of our country's Internet culture."^[33]

On or around March 5, 2007, access to the LiveJournal blogging service from within China became blocked.

On or around March 13, 2007, access to the Xanga blogging service from within China became blocked.[1]

On or around March 20, 2007, access to the Blogger and Blogspot services from within China became blocked.

On or around March 28, 2007, the Blogger and Blogspot services became accessible from within China

[edit] Reactions

[edit] Liberalization of sexually oriented content

Although restrictions on political information remain as strong as ever, several sexually oriented blogs began appearing in early 2004. Women using the web aliases Muzi Mei (木子美) and Zhuying Qingtong (竹影青瞳) wrote online diaries of their sex lives and became minor celebrities. This was widely reported and criticized in mainland Chinese news media, but has not resulted in any real crackdown as of yet. This has coincided with an artistic nude photography fad (including a self-published book by dancer Tang Jiali) and the appearance of pictures of minimally clad women or even topless photos in a few mainland Chinese newspapers, magazines and websites. It is too soon to tell how far this trend will go, but increasingly, censorship is applicable to political content rather than to sexuality. This does not hold true for many dating and "adult chat" sites, both Chinese and foreign, which have been blocked. Some, however, continue to be accessible although this appears to be due more to the Chinese government's ignorance of their existence than any particular policy of leniency.

In 2005, The Register reported that a research has found up to 20,000 Chinese regularly chat undressed.^[34]

[edit] Corporate responsibility

On November 7, 2005 an alliance of investors and researchers representing twenty-six companies in the U.S., Europe and Australia with over US $21 billion in joint assets announced that they were urging businesses to protect freedom of expression and pledged to monitor technology companies that do business in countries violating human rights, such as China. On December 21, 2005 the UN, OSCE and OAS special mandates on freedom of expression called on Internet corporations to "work together ... to resist official attempts to control or restrict use of the Internet."

[edit] Efforts at breaking through

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of

Transwiki:Bypassing the Great Firewall of China

The firewall is largely ineffective at preventing the flow of information and is rather easily circumvented by determined parties by using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and SSH connections to outside mainland China are not blocked, so circumventing all of the censorship and monitoring features of the Great Firewall of China is trivial for those who have these secure connection methods to computers outside mainland China available to them.

Psiphon^[35] is a software project designed by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab under the direction of Professor Ronald Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab. Psiphon is a circumvention technology that works through social networks of trust and is designed to help Internet users bypass content-filtering systems setup by governments, such as China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and others.

"We're aiming at giving people access to sites like Wikipedia," a free, user-maintained online encyclopedia, and other information and news sources, Michael Hull, psiphon's lead engineer, told CBC News Online.^[36]

Neither the Tor website nor the Tor network are blocked, making Tor (in conjunction with Privoxy) an easily acquired and effective tool for circumvention of the censorship controls. Tor maintains a public list of entry nodes, so the authorities could easily block it if they had the inclination. According to the Tor FAQ sections 6.4 and 7.9, Tor is vulnerable to timing analysis by Chinese authorities, so it allows a breach of anonymity. Thus for the moment, Tor allows uncensored downloads and uploads, although no guarantee can be made with regard to freedom from repercussions.

In addition to Tor, there are various HTTP/HTTPS Tunnel Services, which work in a similar way as Tor. At least one of them, Your Freedom, is confirmed to be working from China and also offers encryption features for the transmitted traffic.

It was common in the past to use Google's cache feature to view blocked websites. However, this feature of Google seems to be under some level of blocking, as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites. Currently the block is mostly circumvented by using proxy servers outside the firewall, and is not difficult to carry out for those determined to do so. Some well-known proxy servers have also been blocked.

Some Chinese citizens used the Google mirror elgooG after China blocked Google. It is believed that elgooG survived the Great Firewall of China because the firewall operators thought that elgooG was not a fully functional version of Google.

As Falun Gong websites are generally inaccessible from mainland China, practitioners have launched a company named UltraReach Internet Corp and developed a piece of software named UltraSurf to enable people in mainland China to access restricted web sites via Internet Explorer without being detected.

Other techniques used include Freenet, a peer-to-peer distributed data store allowing members to anonymously send or retrieve information, and TriangleBoy.

Browsing Wikipedia is also possible with a custom browser called Gollum, which can be used without installing it. At present, the Chinese government has not banned searching for Gollum on Google.