January 13, 2004

By Mark Magnier, Times Staff Writer

[...]

China is deeply conflicted about the Internet. It has embraced its economic potential and now boasts the world's second-largest pool of users, after the U.S. Logging on is as easy as dialing a five-digit number from most private phones and no account is necessary.

At the same time, the state wants users to avoid areas it considers off limits, including discussions of high-level corruption and Taiwanese independence, criticism of the Communist Party and support for the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which China has outlawed [...]

In recent months, Beijing has jailed more people for writing negative articles on overseas websites -- a break with its practice in the past, when it focused largely on Chinese sites -- and arrested more ordinary citizens.

Since mid-October, China has arrested, sentenced or denied the appeal of at least 14 Internet essay writers, said Frank Lu of the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

"You no longer need to even be an activist," Lu said. "Just posting your own articles is enough."

Xiao Qiang, director of the Chinese Internet project at the journalism school at UC Berkeley, identifies three broad tools China employs to maintain control: the law, technology and self-control.

Heavy-handed legal tactics tend to be a last resort. Agents arrive at the doorstep to haul a writer off to prison. This silences the writer and sends a signal.

The second approach uses technology to limit citizens' ability to view what the government considers objectionable.

In recent months, China has become far savvier in this area, experts say. It wasn't too long ago that it had to block an entire overseas website containing objectionable material, with questionable results. While blocking the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's site prevented Chinese citizens from accessing encryption programs, for instance, it also frustrated future government engineers trying to apply to the institution.

Now Beijing can block access to a single page, or to links it finds objectionable.

"It sounds easy, but it's been a deep technological problem," said Ben Edelman with Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The firewalls around China require users seeking access to the rest of the Internet to go through a limited number of gateways controlled and monitored by Beijing. China also has improved its ability to divert or hijack requests for sensitive information, redirecting them to harmless sites or "timing out" the request. It's also better able to block sites that constantly change their Web addresses, a tool used in the past to keep one step ahead

of censors.

"With new technology, they're now upgrading their system within a couple of months," said Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, a U.S. company that develops technology to circumvent China's filters. "They probably have to go through approvals, but I'm rather impressed by their speed."

Patrolling Cyberspace

There are limits to the technology, however. You can't block everything. So China has invested heavily in an expanded cyber police force that scours the Web looking for new sites to block, monitoring bulletin boards and identifying "undesirables." Online rumor puts China's cyber police at 30,000.

"That's just a number," said Michael Iannini, Beijing-based general manager with Nicholas International Consulting Services. "The point is they have a lot of people doing what they do to make sure you can't do it."

Of the three repressive tools, self-censorship is potentially the most effective. This includes the chill individuals exert on themselves, as well as the monitoring that cyber cafe owners, local Internet service providers and operators of online bulletin boards are expected to provide.

These tools are meant to keep Chinese from crossing the line.

"But nobody actually knows where the line is," writer Liu Xiaobo said. "Different people have different ideas where it is."

At the Qian Long Wang Du Internet cafe near Renmin University, manager He Fei explained how his staff patrols aisles lined with 500 computers, warning customers against signing on to sites that display politically sensitive issues or pornography. Customers must register by showing an ID card before being assigned to a numbered computer, information the police can access on request.

"I'm concerned about writing anything sensitive online," said Li Nan, a 20-year-old liberal arts student who visits Qian Long Wang Du two or three times a week.

Despite all its efforts to funnel expression into areas it considers appropriate, however, most experts say China is slowly losing the battle. Online bulletin boards and Web logs are opening vast new areas that further tax the state's ability to control it all.

As Liu Di's father worries about her future, he reflects on the pressure put on her by the government as well as supporters of greater democracy.

"People online idealize her, but she's just a kid," he said. "She doesn't even like the image that the Internet made of her. Like her nickname, Stainless Steel Mouse, she sees herself more as an antihero."

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Yin Lijin in The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-internet13jan13,1,7171342.story?coll=la-headlines-world