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China's internet censorship |
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Government
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Written by Peter Warren
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Thursday, 26 January 2006 |
The Chinese government's attitude to internet use encompasses shocking double standards on hacking and censorship.
Thursday January 26, 2006
The Guardian - appeared under the headline 'A dengerous domain'
The plundering of western technology, business and government databases
by Chinese hackers is a sign of Beijing's double standards towards the
development of the internet, experts say.
According to a spokesman at the Chinese embassy in London, hacking
is a crime punishable by death. But Peter Tippett, of CyberTrust, an
organisation that collects global information on the activities of
hacking groups, says that last year, the 80-strong X-Focus hacking
group was able to hold a conference in the Chinese capital. Called
X-Con, the conference discussed coordinating attacks on Japanese
websites during the row between the two countries over the content of
school history books in Japan.
As Tippett observes: "In China, the people who hack have to get through
the Great Firewall of China and all email must go through government
email filters. Yet at the moment we are finding that the vast majority
of computer attacks are coming from China."
Inside China, the picture is very different. The country may have
120 million people online at the start of the year - second only to the
US - but they are not allowed to see sensitive political information
about events in their own country.
Indeed, misuse of the internet - disseminating information about
political unrest, for example - is routinely punished by the
authorities. In 2004, an Amnesty International report noted that "there
has been a dramatic rise in the number of people detained or sentenced
for internet-related offences, an increase of 60% as compared to the
previous year's figures".
However, there are signs that the authorities are not having it all
their own way. For example, Falun Gong, the quasi-religious meditative
movement banned by the Chinese authorities, has turned to the internet
to show the outside world how it has been repressed.
Feng Ma, an expert on China for the Taiwanese intellectual property
law firm Osha Liang, says: "A week or two ago, Falun Gong got pictures
sent out of meditators being beaten up and arrested and that has
happened a lot. Although on the surface people register their internet
use with the authorities, there are a lot of people who are now using
proxy servers to hide what they are doing from the authorities."
According to Ma, most illicit users in China are concerned with
more mundane issues such as getting free goods and software and making
money. "Intellectual property is seen as fair game, especially because
western companies put their factories in China so they can get cheap
labour and avoid environmental rules."
Yet there are also growing online protests aimed at endemic
corruption among state functionaries. Interestingly, the authorities in
Beijing are trying to root out corruption among local party bureaucrats
and this may be encouraging the online protests.
"There is a massive online debate on corruption that is ironically
being government-led - and people are getting their heads cut off,"
confirms Ma.
Overall, the main concern for the Chinese government is with
"stabilisation", the filtering out of keywords that allow its
population to search for seditious material or for sites trying to
foment organised opposition to the central government. Once again,
there are signs that they might not be able to control it as fully as
they would like.
"At a local and national level, they have employed tens of
thousands of people to snoop on the internet and to place
pro-government sentiments, but they don't seem to be able to stop a lot
of the blogging that is going on via the proxies," says Simon Jones,
director of Chinese Marketing and Communications, a media agency
specialising in China.
"That does concern the government because it knows it will lose the mandate to rule if it can't be seen to do it fairly."
Yet the authorities in Beijing still regard the internet as an
important tool in their aim to modernise the country. "The fibre-optic
network is brand new and probably better than any other network in the
world," says Jones. "The Chinese government sees it as having great
potential for educational and economic development so it is not going
to get turned off."
Indeed, the country's desperate need for technological knowhow as
its economy tries to become more sophisticated is behind the hacking of
western technological and commercial secrets.
Arthur Yuan, a lawyer at US-based Senniger Powers, a leading
intellectual property (IP) firm, explains the country's approach to IP.
"The [Chinese] population does not consider the IP of companies abroad
of value. They think that as long as it is for the glorification of the
government, then the taking of information is justified - and they see
no reason why they should not take a shortcut if it is possible."
Indeed, there are rumours of an exclusive club formed in Guangdong
- where much of the hacking is thought to be centred - whose membership
is restricted to those business people who have successfully ripped off
a western company. Though probably apocryphal, the story does reflect a
strand of thought inside China: that stealing a march on foreigners -
and especially rich western foreigners - is not necessarily a bad
thing.
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