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.