Posted on 7-12-2002
Asian
Dragon One-eyed
By Joseph Kahn, NYT, 4 Dec02
China has the most extensive Internet censorship in the world,
regularly
denying local users access to 19,000 Web sites that the government
deems
threatening, a study by the US Harvard Law School researchers
finds.
The study, which tested access from multiple points in China
over six
months, found that Beijing blocked thousands of the most popular
news,
political and religious sites, along with selected entertainment
and
educational destinations. The researchers said censors sometimes
punished
people who sought forbidden information by temporarily making
it hard for
them to gain any access to the Internet.
Defying predictions that the Internet was inherently too diverse
and
malleable for state control, China has denied a vast majority
of its 46
million Internet users access to information that it feels could
weaken its
authoritarian power. Beijing does so even as it allows Internet
use for
commercial, cultural, educational and entertainment purposes,
which it
views as essential in a globalized era. Only the most determined
and
technologically savvy users can evade the filtering, and they
do so at some
personal risk, the study says. "If the purpose of such filtering
is to
influence what the average Chinese Internet user sees, success
could be
within grasp," said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at the law
school and a
co-author of the study.
The study offers fresh evidence that the Internet may be proving
easier to
control than older forms of communication like telephones, facsimile
machines or even letters. China can tap some telephones or faxes
or read
mail. But it cannot monitor every call, fax message and letter.
The Internet, in contrast, has common checkpoints. All traffic
passes
through routers that make up the telecommunications backbone
here. China
blocks all access to many sites, and it has begun selectively
filtering
content in real time — even as viewers seek access to it — and
deleting
individual links or Web pages that it finds offensive. By regularly
testing
access to 200,000 popular Web addresses, the researchers found
that China
blocked up to 50,000 sites at some point in the six-month period.
Of those,
the study found 19,000 sites that could not be reached from
different
places in China on multiple days. The study is at
cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china
Compared with Saudi Arabia, which the team studied earlier,
China exercises
far broader though sometimes shallower control. Beijing completely
blocked
access to the major sites on Tibet and Taiwan. A user who types
"democracy
China" into Google, the popular search engine, would find nearly
all the
top sites with those words out of reach. Google itself was blocked
in
September, although access is now restored. Chinese users cannot
often
reach the sites run by Amnesty International or Human Rights
Watch. China
also does not allow users to connect to major Western religious
sites. News
media sites are also often blocked. Among those users had trouble
reaching
in the test period were National Public Radio, The Los Angeles
Times, The
Washington Post and Time magazine.
Though China says a main justification for censorship is the
proliferation
of pornography, its blocking of such sites is less dogged. The
study found
that China blocked fewer than 15 percent of the most popular
sexually
explicit sites. Saudi Arabia banned 86 percent of the list.
|