not Big Brother, rather a loose collection of Little Brothers

This excerpt from a submission to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, written in 2002, still stands strong for anyone trying to understand how the goverment affects the Internet in China.  David Cowhig covered the Internet for the Environment and Technology Section of the US Embassy in Beijing for many years.  Check out the entire piece–it’s readable and remains highly relevant.

China might be thought of as a decentralized de facto federal state
that lacks federal institutions that facilitate central control and
coordination such as the federal court system and regional offices of
central government ministries. China is best understood not so much as
a Big Brother state but as a loose collection of thousands of
provincial and local Party and government little brothers. Many of the
provincial little brothers have only nominal allegiance to Big Brother
in Beijing. Local officials want to control media not just for
Beijing’s purposes but also to prevent Beijing to know about their own
shortcomings. Many orders and regulations from the central government
are ignored from the outset or forgotten after only a few months.

One corollary of the China’s shortcomings in the rule of law area is
that local governments are not conscientious in obeying orders from
Beijing. The result has been that the central government implements
policies by national campaigns that are intense for a short time but
then swiftly fade away. New regulations are issued not as amendments to
old ones but as de novo regulations – apparently a tacit admission that
the old ones have faded from memory.

…What does this mean for the Internet? New tough rules are issued each
year but are not systematically enforced. Where enforced, enforcement
fades after a few months.

It sounds like a kind of guerilla statecraft.

For complete original text, per reader request, read on…and note, only 15 million Internet users in China in 2001.

Round-Table on Internet and Free Flow of Information in China

Statement by David Cowhig, Wired China: Many Hands on Many Switches

Presented to
Congressional-Executive Commission on China

April 15, 2002

I would like to share with you some thoughts about China and the
Internet based on my five years covering the Internet for the
Environment, Science and Technology Section of the U.S. Embassy in
Beijing. These are my own observations and musings about how Internet
fits into the Chinese social and political system. My views expressed
here do not reflect the views of the U.S. government and are not a
policy prescription of any kind.

When asking the question “Whose Hand is on the Switch?” about the
Internet in China we need to bear in mind that there are many hands and
many switches. Chinese provincial and local governments and indeed
various parts of the central government have far greater coordination
problems than we experience among the federal, state and local
governments in the United States. China might be thought of as a
decentralized de facto federal state that lacks federal institutions
that facilitate central control and coordination such as the federal
court system and regional offices of central government ministries.
China is best understood not so much as a Big Brother state but as a
loose collection of thousands of provincial and local Party and
government little brothers. Many of the provincial little brothers have
only nominal allegiance to Big Brother in Beijing. Local officials want
to control media not just for Beijing’s purposes but also to prevent
Beijing to know about their own shortcomings. Many orders and
regulations from the central government are ignored from the outset or
forgotten after only a few months.

One corollary of the China’s shortcomings in the rule of law area is
that local governments are not conscientious in obeying orders from
Beijing. The result has been that the central government implements
policies by national campaigns that are intense for a short time but
then swiftly fade away. New regulations are issued not as amendments to
old ones but as de novo regulations – apparently a tacit admission that
the old ones have faded from memory. Government by political campaign
as a Chinese government style is gradually fading as more laws are
written down, as China’s leaders keep insisting that “officials really
should be carrying out their duties according to the law” and as the
public learns more about the text of laws and about legal procedures.
Improved public knowledge of the law is in some small part one of the
benefits of the Internet for China. Although the movement away from
government by campaign can be seen in that campaigns are much less
disruptive than they were in the past, being aware of the “government
by campaign” phenomenon can help us better understand China and the
Internet.

What does this mean for the Internet? New tough rules are issued
each year but are not systematically enforced. Where enforced,
enforcement fades after a few months. Last Spring visiting two dozen
“net cafes” in Hunan, I was never asked to produce any ID before using
the computer nor was anyone else. Often regulations requiring
identification of users were posted prominently on the wall. Although
web bar management is supposed to check that clients are not surfing
subversive websites, in practice no one pays attention to which sites
net café clients are visiting. One could say that the rules were
observed only in the sense that one could observe them posted
prominently on the wall. Most of the clientele were in their twenties
who paid about 3 RMB per hour (25 US cents) to use a computer for
online chat, games watching movies (pirate copies of movies were on the
café LAN) and browsing websites. The Changsha, Hunan police estimated
in Spring 2001 that there were 1000 web cafes in the city. Web cafes in
China have a very fuzzy definition that can include not only web cafes
but also computer gaming parlors frequented by truant high school
students and underground locales that show pornographic films on their
computer local area networks. The Changsha police in their spring 2001
crackdown told local newspapers that they were focusing on the
pornographic web bars.

Chinese internet sites are supposed to conform to the same general
guidelines as the media. See the October 2000 State Council Internet
Information Management Regulations

• Threatening national security, leaking state secrets, overthrowing the government, and harming national unity;
• Harming the reputation or interests of the state;
• Fanning ethnic hatred, discrimination on the basis of nationality, and harming the unity of China’s nationalities;
• Harming the state religious policy, propagandizing for evil religions or feudal superstition;
• Spreading false rumors, pornography, gambling, violence, murder, intimidation;
• Insulting or slandering someone, infringing on the legal rights of others;
• Other actions that are contrary to law or administrative regulations.

 

These regulations, like most Chinese regulations, are so broad that
they can be interpreted many different ways. Websites are expected not
to originate news – which web managers in turn interpret as meaning
don’t originate news that is politically sensitive. Many Chinese
websites carry news gathered from the 100-plus Chinese newspapers that
are online. Thus the news on the web, especially breaking news, is not
much better than found in the print press. Some websites, such as
Sina.com (http://www.sina.com.cn)
allow readers to leave their own comments about a news story. Sometimes
these comments are much more interesting than the news stories
themselves. If a newspaper somewhere in China does print a relatively
daring story, the story will often be picked up by websites throughout
the country.

Bad news about corrupt local government in a province often appears
in a local paper in another province since the authorities in the other
province just don’t care so much about suppressing bad news from other
provinces. This information can then leak into the first province over
the net. Indeed, local officials suppress information not just to
prevent their own people from knowing about a problem but also to
prevent higher authorities at the provincial or national level to know
that the glowing reports they send upwards are not entirely correct.

One dramatic illustration of the power of the Internet in China came
after local officials in Jiangxi Province tried to suppress news of an
explosion in an elementary school fireworks factory that killed several
dozen schoolchildren. Efforts by local officials to falsely claim that
a mad bomber and not illegal fireworks assembly was involved was
frustrated by a combination of Chinese journalists and the flow of
information around China on the Internet.

Often local officials succeed in keeping information from reaching
Beijing. At other times Beijing knows but pretends not to know for to
reveal that it knows but can do nothing would amount to a confession of
impotence. One example of how news of a local disaster spreads on the
Internet despite efforts by the local government to suppress is the
report “Revealing the ‘Blood Wound’ of the Spread of HIV/AIDS in Henan
Province” spread around China on websites and email about the HIV/AIDS
disaster in Henan Province. A translation of the report is available at
http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/henan-hiv.htm

Sometimes after a big event in China or abroad, more information and
commentary does leak into China over the Internet from dissident email
publications such as VIP Reference (http://www.bignews.org/) as well as the Huaxia Digest (from http://www.cnd.org
), the VOA’s Chinese language email news service. The sending email
servers of the first two email publications are blocked and so the
originating server often changed. VOA Chinese email news is blocked and
unblocked depending mostly upon the ups and downs of U.S. – China
relations but also upon whether a politically sensitive domestic news
event has occurred.

News from some foreign Chinese newspapers, including, interestingly
enough, some critical reports from the Singapore Morning News (Zaobao)
regularly figure prominently on Chinese news websites. The value added
one sees on the web site includes reports from provincial newspapers in
faraway Chinese cities that one ordinarily wouldn’t see (out of town
newspapers are not so easy to get hold of unless you subscribe) and the
ability to do searches and compare reports over time and from many
different sources. Just as with newspapers and magazines, for websites
commercial pressures tend to increase the diversity and freedom of
information since more attractive media is also of course more viable
in a highly competitive environment.

A great variety of Chinese language books and periodicals are
available online. The cost of getting online continues to fall,
especially in Internet cafes where the use of a local area network
brings connections costs down even lower than they are at home. Online
bookstores have appeared in China, although severe problems in the
areas of credit (few Chinese have credit cards); distribution and
resolution of consumer complaints still severely constrain the
development of online services in China. Many books, including some
banned publications, are also available at minimal cost on CD-ROM as
well as online. Although web content regulations apply to online forums
as much as anything else on the net, the sheer volume of messages and
it seems oftentimes the reluctance of monitors to cut short interesting
conversations.

Although the 15 million users of the Chinese Internet are very few
compared to China’s 1.3 billion population, the Internet is
increasingly arriving in every small town. Together with the rapid
expansion of the inter-provincial highway network, the accelerated pace
of countryside to city labor migration, the Internet is part of some of
the most significant phenomena of the last decade – the shrinking of
the distance between urban and rural China and urban China’s
penetration of rural life.

The Chinese government’s “Government Online” project (http://www.gov.cn)
has put thousands of Chinese government offices online. Many Chinese
laws and regulations are now available online for citizens to consult
and act on – already an important progress from the days just a few
years ago when “confidential regulations” made it very difficult for
citizens to dispute officials on points of law.

Chinese language translations of free market philosophers such as
Frederich Hayek are available online on many web sites such as Issues
and Ideology (http://www.wtyzy.com
). Just as discussions in deep or lengthy Chinese academic books can be
surprisingly open (perhaps the censors give up after the first 20
pages?), so too are direct contradictions of China’s official political
and economic ideology common on the more academic websites. Some of
these articles criticize by analogy. An example is an article reprinted
from the January 2002 issue of “Yellow River”, Li Xianzhi’s meditation
on the last ten years of Lu Xun’s life considers Lu’s critique of one
party dictatorship. This article is on the Issues and Ideology website
at http://www.wtyzy.net/linxianzhilxunzhou.htm.
The analysis fits the Communist people’s democratic dictatorship
perfectly but Lu Xun was talking about Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist
Party. Of course. For example, These websites regularly come under
pressure,some have closed, but many very interesting ones are still out
there. Forum monitors are required to delete “subversive” messages on
China’s many open discussion fora, including the sometimes very lively
“Strong Country Forum” (http://bbs.people.com.cn/ ) run by the tongue of the Communist Party of China — the People’s Daily.

The state of the web in China reflects the uncertain state of China
itself. Most Chinese, including most Communist Party members, want a
more democratic and more open society. China’s communist leaders fear
that the development and modernization brings will help bring will
shake their hold on power and lead to social instability. A Chinese
provincial vice governor said a few years ago, “We are the guardians of
a dead religion but must hold on for the sake of social stability.”
China’s Internet itself, much more an emblem of modernity and progress
than in the United States, will likely trace a wavering path
alternating between greater opening as China moves towards greater
modernization and progress and tightening at times when the Chinese
leadership fears that new ideas and news that might tend to weaken the
Party’s control.

U.S. Embassy Beijing reports on the Internet in China are available at
http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/sandtbak-hp.html#Internet%20and%20Computers

Several translations and summaries of press clippings from Chinese news reports about the Internet are available at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/sandsrc.htm

A list of some of China’s more interesting online bookstores and discussion websites can be found at “Beijing Bookworm” at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/bjbkwrm.html

David Cowhig returned to the United States in July 2001 after nine years in Okinawa, Taipei and Beijing.