The freedom of cyberspace - the WTO column

Now at Chinabiz


30/4/2004

Berkeley, CA - My venture into cyberspace in Shanghai started slightly more than nine years ago in a classical Chinese way: on a bicycle. In the China Daily (the Shanghai Daily did not exist yet) we read next to the articles about the "running dogs of capitalism" articles about the internet and how China would open up for this new dimension of reality.

Now, in those days we did not believe anything the China Daily was writing, so my Australian friend and I stepped on our bicycles and roamed the universities for more information. The stories academics at those universities told us about the internet were enthusiastic, although they could not assure us that we would be online very soon. It would take a few years from then.

We learned that between the different departments a struggle was going on. Some ministries saw the internet as an indispensable tool for China's economic development. A second group feared China would open the box of Pandora and lose control of the country. And a third group of departments thought they would get a good opportunity to make some money themselves.

The 'liberals' won the struggle, although they also had to do some concessions to the conservative side of the government. Controls and restrictions are still in place but the freedom in cyberspace has emerged in a great way. Initially I had to register at a special bureau of Public Security to get permission to go online, but that office must have been abolished. Initially many foreign websites were blocked, so everybody got very much used to using proxies to get easily around then. Even the CIA joined the frenzy by sending me daily new proxies to circumvent the Chinese internet blocks.

But the number of blocks has gone down tremendously. Last week I visited the site of the DPP in Taiwai - can an organization be more evil? - and there was no block. Other filter methods disappeared after they caused tremendous economic damage. Perhaps newcomers online might no longer be familiar with the system of proxies because they are no longer indispensable.

Li Xiguang, dean of the journalism school of Tsingha University in Beijing confirms in a recently published book what has been obvious for some time: the traditional propaganda machine in China is losing the struggle from the internet, Shutting up people does not help anymore when the chatrooms in China get heated up. Despite several degrees of self-censorship in those chatrooms, the number of incidents where the government followed an online outcry is countless. When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed, during SARS, when the US spy plane came down. The internet has become a new way for Chinese to talk to their government.

It is only 80 million out of 1.3 billion Chinese that is online, but it is a fast growing minority and a vocal one.

For the economy the introduction of the internet has been very beneficial. I cannot recall anymore how we survived without the internet. Traditional media and government control is on the way out, at the conservatives feared, but that has not brought disaster over the country. The changes are very much comparable with for example the US where traditional media are also losing their position and the government - and anybody else - is wondering how to talk to the people. The people are too busy to listen, they have found other priorities as the media are increasingly losing the trust of their audiences.

China is in the end less different than it thinks.

Fons Tuinstra