You fight your way through a hectic discount store, slip through a back door and climb three flights of stairs to a dingy hallway. Down a tangle of corridors is a grim little room, illuminated by a small window and a single fluorescent tube. It's 10am but already about 20 men and boys are hunched over the smeared screens and tacky keyboards.
More than 20 million people in China depend on cafes like this one in central Shanghai to use the Internet. But access comes at a price far higher than the two or three yuan (less than US$0.40) charged for an hour's session.
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
The seedy, illicit air of this cafe belies the fact that these venues are under official scrutiny. All customers must register with identity documents, ensuring that the country's Internet police force -- alleged to be 30,000-strong -- can track them down easily. The government has also ensured that cafes install local filters to reinforce the nationwide censorship system dubbed "the Great Firewall of China."
Shanghai, which has the highest level of Internet usage in the country, is subject to additional controls, which might be extended.
Since June, it has been compulsory for cafes to install a video camera and software that detects any attempt to browse a banned site, then automatically informs government supervisors.
If you try to access the BBC, for instance, you're told that the server is not available. Type in the name of Louisa Lim, its Beijing correspondent, and the search engine will return results for her stories -- but will refuse to let you have access.
Only last week, the government's China Internet Network Information Center reported that inspectors had visited 1.8 million cafes in a six-month crackdown, closing down 18,000 temporarily and 1,600 for good. Beijing says it is concerned about young people accessing pornographic or violent sites. Human rights groups say that it is trying to silence critics.
Logging on at home is not necessarily safer. Individuals are being arrested and detained for lengthy periods, often without trial, for disseminating information judged to be seditious via the Internet. A report issued earlier this year by Reporters Without Borders noted that at least 61 "cyberdissidents" were in prison.
Others have been detained for "spreading rumors" -- eg, comments on the government's handling of the SARS crisis -- via text messages.
This is a tiny number, when you consider that by the end of the year China will have 111 million Internet users (making it the largest online community in the world after the US), but such repression does serve to crystallize arguments about how economic development will affect social and political life in China.
The rosy-eyed view of many western theorists in the 1980s and 1990s was that introducing market forces would automatically lead to radical political change. Businesses would be unable to prosper without an unhindered flow of information and the rule of law (that is, an independent legal framework in place of an elaborate legal code that could nonetheless be amended at the whim of officeholders.) This would in turn lead to representative government.
The development of the Internet could be seen as a microcosm of this; former US president Bill Clinton described it as a harbinger of democracy. Optimists believed that Beijing could not control it and that Chinese citizens, discovering free information sources, would acquire an irresistible taste for openness and political assertion.
Critics say that far from promoting civil and political liberties, capitalism has helped to reinforce repression as western companies compromise their principles in return for a share in a huge market. "It seems disingenuous for companies to say their presence improves human rights when they act on behalf of, or tailor their products to, the demands of censors," says Ben Carrdus, a researcher on Amnesty International's China team.
Google came under fire when it emerged that banned sites did not appear in news-search results for Chinese users. The company says that it is simply ensuring that users are not frustrated by trying to reach inaccessible sites.
But things may not be as bad as they seem, and US claims of "hundreds of thousands" of sites being blocked may be an exaggeration.
"The first time I went into a chatroom about the Dalai Lama, I thought that within half an hour police would storm my apartment," says Fons Tuinstra, a Dutch journalist based in Shanghai for the past decade.
"That doesn't happen. At worst [blocking] is a nuisance. It's symbolic: they block a very small number of sites and it's so easy to go around it," he said.
You can replace a character with one that sounds similar (four or five different characters can stand for "hu," "jin" and "tao," for example, allowing one to spell the president's name phonetically,) or write allusively, perhaps using stories from ancient China to illuminate current affairs. One of the country's most popular search terms is "proxy," whereby another computer acts as an intermediary for surfers, helping them to access banned Web sites and helping to disguise their interests.
The Internet cafe I visited never bothered to register me. No alarm bells rang when I tried to access the BBC; a couple of BBC stories had been mirrored on accessible Web pages, and among the results on a Google Web search was a site discussing the Tiananmen Square massacre (although I couldn't reach it.)
Not that this would have interested the other users, who were mostly deep in multi-player games.
"The west thinks that people here wake up every morning and think, `Oh, I wish I had democracy,'" says Tuinstra, whose Connecting China project aims to encourage Chinese users to discuss their lives with the global online community.
"When you talk to Internet users here, they are going to play games and chat to their friends and maybe do some business. China doesn't need a firewall; people are not that inclined to look at [news from] other places anyway -- just like users in the US and UK," Tuinstra says.
But when you talk to users, it is clear that at least a small minority is keen to evade censorship, but frightened to discuss the fact that they're doing so. One young woman -- too scared to give her name -- admits that she has used proxies to read about democracy and the Tiananmen Square massacres.
But ask her to explain how she found out about the technology and banned sites and she clams up in a heartbeat.
"It was when I was at university -- I don't use them any more," she says. "Anyway, I don't want to talk about it."
Accessing proxies can also be a problem; the authorities block them when they discover them, and users are wary of sharing information. As Tuinstra points out: "Letting people inform on each other still works much better than electronic surveillance."
Better still is scaring users into censoring themselves. No one I spoke to could tell me where the figure of 30,000 Internet policemen originated. But researchers pointed out that it was in Beijing's interests to persuade its citizens that Big Brother lurks in every cafe. Similarly, arrest a few people and you frighten many more into compliance.
"The people arrested are [generally] publishing information or releasing information to organizations outside," says Bill Xia of Dynamic Internet Technology, a US-based firm which provides a proxy network so that Chinese users can access banned Web pages. "But for most people it's a fear that's everywhere. They have so many bad memories and know what the government can do for any -- or no -- reason."
But he also argues that to regard the advent of democracy as the only test of the Internet's worth is to set the stakes too high. He believes that it can help ordinary citizens as well as the better off.
"There are cases where police have treated people badly, it's been reported outside the country, and that's prompted the authorities to take the matter up," he says. "Sometimes all it takes is a single e-mail to make a really big story. The Internet is already making a difference."
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