China tames wild, wild Web

The Flying Universe Internet cafes, together straddling a city block and chocked with 1,600 computers, were the toast of online Beijing. Some featured spacious booths and stuffed animals as part of the colorful décor.

In the past year, the Chinese government has accomplished a task considered in the West about as easy as changing the weather: It has controlled internet content, even while rapidly expanding access to the World Wide Web. The conventional assumption in the West - that allowing millions to use an interactive medium of free expression would usher in political liberalization - is not being borne out here.

"China has done something very impressive. It has put controls on a medium that was previously [thought] to have none," says Peter Lovelock of Made for China, a respected international telecom marketing firm in Beijing. The government, he says, "has moved to a self-censorship policy. It gives people a stake in the system, but also scares them into limiting their behavior."

Chinese internet use has soared from 2 million in 1998, to to some 23 million today. Young males between 18 and 25 are the biggest cohort. Some 300 cities now have high-speed access to the data pipeline. China users here can log on to Taiwan daily newspapers; within reason, they can exchange skeptical messages about news events.

Yet several new studies show that far from using web access to import ideas that are challenging or even disrupting, China's management is serving to support and reinforce the Chinese system.

Chinese security and propaganda agencies have been able to set limits without launching major crackdowns, cutting cables to the outside world, or closing the major service providers or web sites. Instead, authorities deftly regulate the cultural atmosphere behind the internet.

Rules are signaled by "just enough action," as one scholar puts it: A select number of cafes are closed. Regulations are continuously issued. Chat-room monitors delete forbidden words. Fines are levied. A sophisticated central filter (wryly referred to as "The Great Firewall") monitors overseas access - and does block some foreign web sites.

In the past several months, for example, as many as 8,000 internet cafes have been shut across China. The cafes either were not properly registered, did not stop access to forbidden sites, or were considered dens of lassitude where viewing pornography or playing video games were the main activities.

An estimated 45,000 cafes remain open - though studies show that only about 15 percent of Chinese who log on use the cafes.

As internet use exploded here in the late 1990s, and as joint ventures eyed the potential of what became called "China Dot.Com" - some in the West began to think of China as building a host of cyber civil society groups that would percolate new ideas. Even in the past year, the operative metaphor among human rights and pro-democracy lobby groups abroad is that China's internet growth means "the genie is out of the bottle."

Yet with some irony, the latest joke is that, "Yes, the genie is out of the bottle, and it is a genie with Chinese characteristics."

A few internet-related arrests have been made. Activist Lin Hai sent 30,000 email addresses to a US democracy newsletter - and was arrested in March 1998. Another, Huang Qi, was put on trial this spring for "subverting state power" by posting family member details of those killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Still, some intellectuals, even those who can't publish, do use the internet as a forum for free speech. Dai Qing, for example, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), found his "Fifty Years of My Past" - an account of his political disillusionment - sent around via email.

There is, as well, a lively sport in the use and evolution of "proxy servers" that circumvent the firewall. Partly aided by Western corporate technology, authorities are becoming better at identifying and stopping the proxy activity.

These renegade circles are small, however. A new CASS study finds that while adult Chinese users spend 25 percent of their time on sites outside China, and those under 18 spend 40 percent on outside sites - a full 70 percent still mainly trust traditional Chinese media, particularly the highly censored state-run TV. The face-to-face survey of 5,000 Chinese was conducted in five urban areas, and overseen by Guo Liang and Bu Wei of CASS.

"We shouldn't be surprised. If people in China are self-censoring anyway, why have a crackdown?" argues Eric Harwit, a University of Hawaii China expert and co-author of "Shaping the Internet in China," a study published last month. "Most of the new users in China are young guys who have education, jobs, and money. In the 1990s, China and the Party delivered for them. Why should they oppose a system that allowed them a good position?"

A new working paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington bluntly questions the conventional wisdom that "the internet poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian regimes." The study looks at Cuba, which has somewhat crudely limited people's access to the web, and China, which has not.

Authors Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor Boas find that, "Far from hastening its own demise by allowing the internet to penetrate its borders, an authoritarian state can actually utilize the Internet to its own benefit and increase its stability by engaging with the technology."

In the case of China, the authors point out, the internet has proven to be a tool for monitoring and coordinating various levels of the Communist Party. It has been useful to pro-China propagandists. The People's Daily Strong Country web site, for example, was officially sanctioned after NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia - and has been a venue for a wide variety of impassioned speech, much of it anti-foreign.

Dr. Harwit found that the potential business gold mine in internet commerce, particularly with China set to join the WTO in November, is where many government leaders are now looking. "Here is where we see the greatest control," Harwit notes.