Can the Internet Free China?

WEB SITES AND E-MAILS ARE CRACKING CHINA'S GREAT WALL OF CENSORSHIP--A REVOLUTION THE GOVERNMENT SEEMS POWERLESS TO STOP

In a nondescript office in Washington, D.C., Li Hongkuan, 35, leans over his laptop, clicks SEND, and launches another strike against China's Communist government 7,000 miles away. His weapon: an e-mail newsletter that will hit a quarter million computer screens in China, bypassing Chinese government censors. Filled with news on human rights, democracy, free speech, and criticism of the government, the newsletter, VIP Reference, showers Chinese citizens with stories the government wants to keep secret.

Li's stated goal: "We are destined to destroy the Chinese system of censorship over the Internet."

So far, that's exactly what he's doing.

China's Communist government has always suppressed dissent through strict control of the media--including TV, radio, newspapers, and books. But as China prepares to celebrate 50 years of Communist rule on October 1, the government's iron grip on information faces its greatest challenge ever. Li, and hundreds of thousands of people within China, are using the Internet to spread news, share ideas, and even to join together in protest. For now, the government seems powerless to do anything about it.

"The impact is revolutionary," says Xiao Qiang (shou chang), executive director of Human Rights in China, a pro-democracy group based in New York City. "The Internet has created a public space for discussion, which China has never had. The whole foundation of Chinese government control is being chipped away at a very fast speed, and over the next five years, there's no way they can stop it."

Certainly, the government has tried. China's security agencies have formed special units to combat the spread of dissident information. And the government uses an electronic "firewall" to block access to Web sites it deems objectionable. But it cannot keep up with new sites, and clever computer users can sidestep the firewall. E-mail is virtually uncontrollable. VIP Reference, for instance, is sent from a different American e-mail address every day to prevent blocking by government censors.

OLD-FASHIONED INTIMIDATION

As a result, the government has fallen back on pre-Internet methods of intimidation. Last year police in Shanghai arrested a 30-year-old computer engineer named Lin Hal and charged him with "inciting subversion" of the government. His crime? Selling 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to the VIP Register. In January, judges socked him with a two-year prison term, a sentence many saw as a warning to others.

Lin says he had no political motives, but others may. Last year, a group opposed to the Communist regime organized the China Democracy Party. With help from e-mail and the Internet, it began recruiting supporters across the country.

For Chinese President Jiang Zemin (jong za-MEEN), "the thing that was so threatening was certainly not the number of people [joining the party]," says China expert Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based, foreign-policy think tank, "but that the China Democracy Party was able to establish branches in over two thirds of Chinese provinces."

The government quickly arrested two of the party's leaders, and last December, after a 3 1/2-hour-long trial, sentenced them to more than a decade in prison.

MASS MEDITATION

Then this spring, a bizarre event closer to home gave China's leaders even more cause for paranoia. On a warm Sunday morning in April, Jiang and his top officials--who live together with their families in a private compound in Beijing, China's capital--awoke to discover 10,000 people quietly exercising and meditating right outside their compound's walls. The silent visitors, many of whom were middle-aged women and retirees belonged to Falun Gong, a sect founded in 1991 by a former clerk, Li Hongzhi. They had used e-mail and Internet Web sites to organize their appearance.

The group is dedicated to exercise, deep breathing, and spiritual beliefs borrowed from Eastern religions. They posed no threat and made no demands. They simply exercised and, after a few hours, they left.

But the fact that such a large movement caught security forces so completely off guard stunned government officials. Jiang reacted like a man who had just seen his house set on fire.

Within days, the government fired off a barrage of anti-Falun Gong circulars, newspaper editorials, and TV broadcasts. The ministry of civil affairs accused the Falun Gong members of "inciting and creating disturbances and jeopardizing social stability" (a charge that drew immediate denials--again via the Internet--from the group's members). Some 5,000 Falun Gong followers were arrested. To Jiang's surprise, about 1,200 of them either worked for his own government or served in the army.

GOVERNMENT LASHES OUT

Security forces bundled the government workers off to "re-education" centers for large doses of Communist literature. They also removed Falun Gong's Web sites from the Internet and publicly crushed and burned 1.5 million of the group's books and tapes. Then, they posted a $6,000 reward for the arrest of Fulan Gong founder Li Hongzhi, who now lives safely in New York City with his wife and teenage daughter. And earlier this month, the government announced plans to sentence up to 50 of the group's leaders to life in prison.

The harsh response to Falun Gong, however, has hardly resolved the dilemma still facing China's leaders. Banning computers and the Internet altogether would send the nation's economy into a tailspin. "The Chinese government has made the decision that it wants to continue to advance information technology, that it is too important for their economic modernization to stop," says China expert Elizabeth Economy.

But the same tool that helps China modernize also gives Communism's critics a greater voice. And that voice will only grow louder. The number of Internet users in China has doubled to 4 million people in just the past eight months. And in two or three years, says Xiao Qiang, of Human Rights in China, as many as 60 million Chinese may go online regularly.

That's still a small fraction of China's 1.2 billion people. But the impact could be dramatic.

"Give it some time, and you'll see hundreds of independent voices emerging," Xiao says confidently. "China will have independent thinking for the first time. Then there will be no way to turn these people back to the way things were three years ago."

THE WORLD'S YOUNGEST POLITICAL PRISONER

Of all the people posing a threat to China, a poor 6-year-old boy from central Tibet would seem the least likely.

Not to China's leaders, however, in May 1995, they sent security forces to seize Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, along with his parents and older brother. He has not been seen or heard from again. Assuming he's still alive, he just might be the world's "youngest political prisoner," says Tibet's exiled religious leader and former ruler, the Dalai Lama. "I am really concerned about the poor boy's safety."

Others are too, in this mountainous nation of 6 million on China's southern border. For six years before Gedhun's kidnapping, Buddhist monks had searched for the boy considered to be the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama ("Great Scholar"), Tibet's second-most-important Buddhist leader after the Dalai Lama. They had visited holy sites seeking signs, conducted ancient rituals with conch shells, and prayed. Finally, they had chosen Gedhun out of 28 children, all born around the time of the previous Panchen Lama's death in 1989. That the Chinese could consider the 6-year-old a threat, and kidnap him, says much about the long, often-violent history between China and its mountainous neighbor.

INVASION AND EXILE

During the 18th and 19th centuries, Tibet had fended off several Chinese attempts to conquer it. In 1949, under the new leadership of Mao Zedong, China invaded Tibet again, in force, this time crushing its small army and forcing the Dalai Lama, then 15 years old, to sign an agreement accepting Chinese rule.

In the years that followed, Tibet's dogged resistance to Chinese rule prompted a brutal response. Chinese troops killed over a million Tibetans, destroyed 99 percent of the Buddhist temples and monasteries, and imprisoned thousands of monks, nuns, and freedom fighters. In 1959 the Dalai Lama himself fled to India and a life in exile with thousands of followers.

Since then, Chinese immigrants have flooded into Tibet, and the authorities have subjected Tibetan women to forced sterilization and abortions, thereby reducing the proportion of Tibetans in the population.

Despite Chinese repression, the fervently religious Tibetans have continued to declare allegiance to the Dalai Lama, now 64, and to their religion. "All Tibetans want the Dalai Lama to come home, more than anything else," says Thondrup, a 57-year-old herdsman, who, like many Tibetans, uses only one name.

Unable to rid Tibet of its religion, Chinese leaders then sought to use that religion to their own advantage. When the 10th Panchen Lama died in 1989, they planned to oversee the selection of his replacement, and to turn the chosen boy into a pro-Chinese figurehead.

But unknown to Chinese officials, the monk leading the search had secretly sent the names of the 28 final candidates to the Dalai Lama at his home in India. According to various accounts, the Dalai Lama either approved of the group's choice, or made the choice himself.

A TALE OF TWO LAMAS

Before Beijing's leaders could announce their own selection, the Dalai Lama publicly proclaimed Gedhun the new Panchen Lama. That's when the Chinese became Infuriated, seized the boy and his family, and named a new Panchen Lama of their own-a 6-year-old named Gyaltsen Norbu.

When Tibetan monks protested, demanding that Gedhun be returned, Chinese police raided the monastery, beating 33 monks and shipping them off to prison. The Dalai Lama has appealed to all governments to press for Gedhun's release.

Now, five years later, the dispute goes on. Although China forbids anyone from carrying or displaying pictures of Gedhun, his photograph appears in homes and shops throughout the country. "We all love him," says one 57-year-old Tibetan woman. "No one listens to Beijing."

--Amy Miller

TALKING 'BOUT A REVOLUTION: COMMUNIST CHINA AT 50

On October 1, the People's Republic of China plans a huge bash to celebrate its 50th birthday.

For centuries, China was a strong, centrally governed empire ruled by dynasties, or ruling families. But by the early 1900s, it was weak and coming apart. In 1949, Mao Zedong, a poet and philosopher, led a revolution to re-unite China under Communism, and the People's Republic of China was born.

Mao's Communism was dedicated to economic equality for all, enforced by a dictatorship of the Communist Party.

Mao tried to modernize China's peasant economy. But he also brought totalitarian rule, and a rigid, government-controlled economy. He tolerated no dissent, and forced peasants to live on large collective farms.

In the late 1960s, Mao decided that the people were losing their revolutionary zeal. So he launched the Cultural Revolution, forcing millions of urban teenagers into the countryside for "re-education," intensive doctrination in Communist ideology, and executing millions of political opponents.

After Mao died in 1976, China's next leader, Deng Xiaoping (DUNG shou-PING), opened the door to capitalism, allowing people to own and run their own businesses. China's economy boomed and many of its 1.2 billion people have begun to emerge from poverty. But Deng and his successor, President Jiang Zemin, have continued to crush all political dissent.

For more information on this subject, and links to pro-democracy Web sites, visit: www.nytimes.com/upfront

This article was reported by ERIK ECKHOLM and SETH FAISON, The New York Times China correspondents in Beijing, and BARBARA CROSSETTE, The New York Times United Nations reporter in New York.