When a Chinese-American Internet conference convened in Washington on Tuesday, a middle-aged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda chief was seated in a roomful of tech industry executives, US officials and Web luminaries.
The chief, Lu Wei (魯煒), might have looked like the odd man out, but he commanded attention. As China’s new Internet czar, he is the doorkeeper to the lucrative Chinese market for US Internet companies, as well as the ambassador of an assertive policy in which China blocks Web sites, censors content and tracks users within its borders.
And he is having his moment.
Illustration: Constance Chou
Since taking over the Chinese State Internet Information Office last year and becoming the director of a powerful Internet committee headed by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in May, Lu has ratcheted up restrictions in what is already the world’s most sophisticated system of online censorship.
He has curbed the country’s freewheeling social media pioneers by issuing stern warnings in private meetings and severely restricting some accounts. On his watch, the Chinese government increased blocks on foreign Web sites and issued new regulations to restrict sharing on social media and increase censorship of popular video sites.
At a trade conference in London in June, Lu unapologetically defended China’s need for stronger Internet controls, and at an October news conference in Beijing, he made it plain that an unfettered Facebook could not expect to operate in China.
“I didn’t say Facebook could not enter China, but nor did I say that it could,” he said at the news conference. “Foreign Internet companies can come to China if they abide by the law. We could not allow any companies to enter China’s market and make money while hurting the country.”
Lu did not respond to a fax to his office seeking comment for this article.
Given to making stolid, jargon-laden speeches, Lu, 54, could not be more different from the new generation of businessmen who built the sector he oversees. His style — loud, direct and gregarious — was on display last month when he presided over China’s first World Internet Conference, a gathering of Chinese politicians, top Chinese Internet company chiefs and executives from many major Western tech companies.
He smoked cigars with a Cuban telecom official, power-walked in sweats for exercise at the conference site in the whitewashed canal village of Wuzhen and canceled a presentation to dash off to greet Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) in the nearby town of Hangzhou.
“He pitched his tent and was trying to get everyone to come in,” one person who has met with Lu said.
“He’s very confident and very definitely a politician,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his meetings with Lu were confidential. “He’s a smoker, he drinks, he’s up late, he’s up early, he’s a workaholic. He’s like a ringmaster, trying to be at the center of everything and juggling a million things at once, and he’s pretty good at it.”
Lu has called repeatedly for “respect of national sovereignty” on the Internet, arguing that nations should be left to regulate the Internet within their borders as they see fit.
That position clashes with those advocated by human rights groups, which claim free online expression as a basic right, and business interest groups, which call for equal market access for Internet and technology companies.
Lu spent his early career as bureau chief of Xinhua news agency in Guangxi Province, where his flair for showmanship caught the eye at Beijing headquarters, not least because he made sure that an official car drove to the steps of the plane when an out-of-town boss arrived.
He ascended the ranks to become secretary-general and vice bureau chief at the news agency’s headquarters and in 2011 was promoted to vice mayor of Beijing and chief of the capital’s propaganda department.
It was in Beijing that Lu began to expound his views on the Internet. In a July 2010 essay in Seeking Truth, a party philosophy journal, he wrote that China should bolster its control over the way information is disseminated internationally in new technologies, like the Internet.
After warning that “phony or distorted information can mislead capital and disrupt markets,” he added: “Without information security, there is no financial security, there’s no economic security and there’s no national security in the truest sense.”
The essay helped identify what for the Chinese leadership would become a metastasizing fear: The potential of social media to destabilize governments. Later that year, the Arab Spring provided concrete examples.
In 2011, the spread of reports about a high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou, China, showed how Chinese social networks could evade the country’s censorship regime.
Then last year, leaks by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about US government surveillance showed how vulnerable countries like China were to spying.
Last year, while still in the Beijing government, Lu exhorted the city’s 60,000 propaganda officials to make better use of social media, like the Sina Weibo microblogging platform.
“Watch [Sina] Weibo, open a Weibo account, send Weibo messages, study Weibo,” he said, according to Xinhua.
“Lu Wei was the right man, at the right position, at the right moment,” Oxford University research academic Rogier Creemers said. “The traditional guard that ran the propaganda department were slightly too hidebound. The idea was they needed clever people who knew what they were talking about. Suddenly someone makes a public stand that shows he understands the Internet and social media, as well as its international expansion.”
One of Lu’s first challenges in his current job was reining in social media. He held a series of well-publicized dinners at fancy Beijing restaurants with some of China’s most well-known social media figures. Known as the Big V’s, for verified account, some had millions of online followers and had already shown how they could turn sensitive subjects — like forced relocations and environmental problems — into national debates that upset the CCP.
He warned them to take responsibility for their actions, and later, on national television, he instructed eight prominent bloggers in blunt terms to be more positive. He closed or limited the functions of some of the Big V’s accounts.
One well-known online personality, Chinese-American businessman Charles Xue (薛必群), was later detained for eight months on prostitution charges, though a torrent of official media reports left little doubt that the government’s anger at Xue was based on his online writings.
Last year, analysts say, Lu masterminded a Chinese Supreme Court decision that limits to 500 the number of times an article can be reposted without the original author assuming legal responsibility. Because spreading false rumors is a crime, the decision means that anyone who writes a popular, but subversive post could be held liable and face prison time.
Such measures drew the attention of Li, analysts say, who rewarded Lu with the job of director of the Chinese Central Internet Security and Informatization Leading Group, a group headed by the president and charged with increasing Internet controls, enhancing protection against foreign online attacks and developing new technologies.
Lu now has his sights on gaining a substantial say for China in international oversight of the Web.
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