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China is putting '1984' to shame

Eleven years after its initial connection to the World Wide Web, China's access to the Internet is still guarded by firewalls, embedded in its proxy servers, which have proven to be more practical and impenetrable than the Berlin Wall. Moreover, an increase in the demand for broadband connections has triggered the launch of a US$800 million "Golden Shield Project," an automatic digital system of public policing that will help prolong Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule by denying China's people the right to information.

The principle underlying the Golden Shield is that "as virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten." Aided by systems developed by Western intelligence agencies, China has forged a virtual sword that threatens to block the path to democracy.

Internet "gateways" mainly supervise and filter political information in China. Their technical functions include blocking overseas Web sites, filtering content and key words on Web pages, monitoring email and Internet cafes, hijacking PC's, sending out viruses, and inter-connecting with the monitoring systems of the Public Security Bureaus.

Rather than heralding a new era of freedom, the Internet is enabling Chinese authorities to perfect totalitarian control in a way that puts the rulers in George Orwell's 1984 to shame.

Since April 15, the Golden Shield's advanced science and technology has been monitoring every thought and action of those Chinese people who use the Internet. But what Orwell failed to predict is that China's government has accomplished this with the help of Western democracies.

Today, China is the only country in the world that has enshrined in law the concept of a "Web political criminal." Publishing articles on the Internet can amount to "committing an offense," and "radical views" may result in imprisonment. The real criminals, the officers of the companies -- Nortel, Cisco and Sun Microsystems -- that built this sinister system of mind control, will never get closer to a prison than China's five-star hotels.

From 2000, when the first Chinese "Web criminal" Lin Haiyin was imprisoned for instigating subversive actions, to the recent arrest of writer Shi Tao (師濤), more than 100 independent intellectuals have been imprisoned for expressing their views. Internet monitoring is also behind the constant rise in the number of Falun Gong practitioners executed by the state -- a total of 1,692 as of April 18.

Internet communication in modern China is filled with baits and traps: user-friendly Web page designs, easy-to-click icons and symbolized facial expressions, beautiful female stars in online ads and constantly updated international news induce users to participate and express their own ideas. But once someone's fingertips touch the keyboard, the "Kitchen Table Democracy" of the Web no longer exists -- he or she may find themselves stepping into a trap, because the Internet Police monitor every word that is typed.

In a country where freedom of expression has been off-limits for half a century, the Internet was a godsend: people poured their enthusiasm into it by building Web sites and personal homepages. Now these people find themselves exposed to the Public Security Bureaus.

For example, the Democracy and Freedom Web site has been either temporarily shut down or blocked 43 times in three years. Its robust reports on the death of Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), the reform-minded leader of the 1980s who was imprisoned for objecting to the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 1989, ultimately forced it to succumb to the power of the Golden Shield.

Today, the average online lifespan of proxy servers in China is a mere 30 minutes, and 17,000 Internet cafes have been shut down. The online filtering technology is capable of blocking or intercepting the e-mails of the 80 million or so "Netizens" in China.

Because Internet chat rooms and personal e-mails have become essential to many Chinese, the upgrading of Internet supervision is also gaining momentum. As a result, thinkers today are far more likely to get caught expressing "unsanctioned" ideas than they ever were in the 1980s and early 1990s, when underground publications served as the main channel of free expression.

Indeed, although the Internet's coverage in China has been expanding steadily, the CCP's ability to censor it has grown even faster, thanks to Western technology. The party has been dreaming of this kind of oversight ever since its revolutionary days. Dictatorship is not only safe in China, it's on the offensive.

But not forever. Although the Golden Shield Project is the CCP's largest single investment in the ideological field since it gained control of China in 1949, it is also likely to be the last big bet before the party's collapse. Like the Berlin Wall, China's Internet restrictions may be technically sound, even as they defend the indefensible and sustain the unsustainable.

Ma Jian is the author of the acclaimed memoir Red Dust and of the novel The Noodlemaker, among other books. He now lives in exile.

Copyright: Project Syndicate
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