Cyber speech: catalyzing free expression and civil society. (China).

In November 1992, an oceanographer in Seattle called my office after finding a bottle that had been drifting across the Pacific Ocean for 11 years. A leaflet inside contained information about Wei Fingsheng, then China's most prominent political prisoner, who had been sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1979. Until the contents of the bottle arrived on my desk in New York City, the world had not heard anything about Wei since his sentencing.

A decade later, we no longer have to rely on fortuitous messages in bottles to receive news from inside the People's Republic of China (PRC). The country's opening to the outside world, the rapid expansion of access to the Internet, and reforms in state-owned media reveal a greater flow of information within China and between China and the rest of the world. Over the past two decades, China's rapid economic growth allowed it to emerge as an economic and political power in the international community. China is now a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and will host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. With booming Internet use and an expanding high-tech sector, the government lauds the country's transformation into an "Information Society."

Despite this remarkable progress, however, the country is still a one-party state, and its leaders are fearful that free speech combined with the free flow of information could destroy their political legitimacy and control over society. Maintaining the status quo and preventing democratic reform is the central agenda of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although Wei Jingsheng was eventually released and exiled after international pressure and attention, thousands of political prisoners still languish in China's jails, including an increasing number of individuals who published material online. The government views the Internet as vital to economic and technological development but is expending significant resources to maintain control over both Internet content and public access to that content.

The rise of the Internet has provided PRC citizens with unprecedented opportunities to access a diverse range of information and perspectives. Furthermore, citizens' rising demands for greater freedom of expression, combined with new technologies, are challenging government controls and facilitating conditions for the growth of civil society and the emergence of free press.

Online Censorship

China is experiencing a digital revolution. Internet usage has continued to expand exponentially, rising from two million registered Internet accounts to 59 million people with 21 million computers online in the past five years. Some optimistic government officials predict that China's online population will reach 300 million in three years, which represents more than 15 percent of its 1.3 billion people. Although most Internet users today live in large cities, Internet cafes are becoming ubiquitous throughout China.

Since 1995, the PRC government has been the main force promoting the expansion of the Internet and high technology in China, in order to improve the country's economic competitiveness as a "knowledge-based economy." Though they acknowledge that China needs the economic benefits the Internet brings, authorities also fear the political fallout from the free flow of information. Since the Internet first reached the country, the government has used an effective multi-layered strategy to control Internet content and monitor online activities at every level of Internet service and content networks.

As PRO citizens increasingly rely on the Internet for news and perspectives banned from the official media, the government has escalated its efforts to control online content. Known to the world as the "Great Firewall," a sophisticated infrastructure blocks access to "harmful" or "subversive" websites and monitors users' online activities, allowing the government to enforce self-censorship of China-based websites and arrest Internet users for publishing online.

In 1996, the government established the Surveillance Center for National Information Security to monitor the flow of information, which has now been expanded to the provincial, city, and county levels. Indeed, the PRC government has made information security the main priority of Internet development and has devoted enormous financial resources to this end, creating a competitive market for sophisticated surveillance technology among hundreds of domestic and international companies.

Since 1995, more than 60 laws have been enacted to govern Internet activities in China. The latest regulations enacted in August 2002 require Internet publishers to censor their own sites or risk being shut down. More than 30,000 state security employees are currently conducting surveillance of web pages, chat rooms, and private email messages. Thousands of Internet cafes--almost half of all online establishments--were closed in 2002. Those remaining have been forced to install software that filters out more than 500,000 banned sites with offensive or "subversive" content.

The technological capacity to monitor what citizens read and write online has led to dozens of arrests. In the last two years, human rights organizations have documented more than 50 people who were held on subversion charges for publishing or distributing information online. For example, in August 2002 police in Lianyuan, Hunan Province, arrested writer Chen Shaowen for "using the Internet to subvert state power." An official media report of his arrest accused Chen of "repeatedly browsing reactionary websites" and contributing articles to overseas web sites.

Can the internet Be Controlled?

Even under these restrictive conditions, the development of the Internet has impacted Chinese society in important ways, irrevocably altering the information environment of Chinese citizens. While government efforts to control the Internet have been largely effective, the flexibility and pervasiveness of new media is enabling more and more censored information to penetrate the Great Firewall. Those who can get online are exposed to more diverse and numerous sources of information and have unprecedented opportunities to communicate and express themselves on social, political, and personal issues. Simultaneously, the interaction between information and communication technology and the traditional media creates a dynamic that is challenging almost all boundaries of the traditional censorship system and thereby the official media as well.

Ever since the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, control of information has been central to the ruling CCP's governing strategy. As a one-party authoritarian regime, the CCP has made all mass media, from newspapers and magazines to television channels and radio stations, mouthpieces of the party. As Daniel Lynch, author of After the Propaganda State, has noted, the CCP creates and maintains a "symbolic environment" in order to encourage citizens to accept the regime's political legitimacy.

But after 20 years of economic reform toward a market economy, commercial pressure is a primary factor behind the pluralization of the CCP's "symbolic environment." As a result, Chinese media has become more diversified and professional, a process that will deepen under new rules of WTO membership. While the government's mechanisms to control the media are still firmly in place, they are increasingly challenged by market pressures and a growing sense of independence among the country's media professionals.

The Internet has accelerated the transformation of China's media landscape and is now helping to promote the increasing autonomy and diversity of the traditional media. Now, in addition to 2,000 daily newspapers and 900 television stations catering to more than 90 million cable television users, there are more than 350,000 websites in China. As people's means of accessing information increase, they search further afield to locate alternatives to the information provided by official state media institutions. Even according to a government survey, approximately 64 percent of people online in China use the Internet to read news, and 40 percent of young users and 24 percent of adults regularly visit overseas sites, according to a government survey.

The state media is also beginning to go online. In 1993, the Hangzbou Daily launched the first electronic edition of a Chinese newspaper, and by the end of last year, 4,000 of 100,000 Chinese media organizations, including magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television channels, were online, according to mainland scholars' statistics. Because online versions of official publications have more direct interaction with readers, rely on breaking news, and are under less stringent editorial control than their print counterparts, reporting in Internet publications is often livelier and more independent than in the traditional media.

As Internet users within and outside China develop creative new methods to circumvent government Internet blockades, PRC citizens have access to increasingly diverse and abundant sources of news from outside the country. While most of the major overseas Chinese-language news sites--including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Voice of America (VOA), and Hong Kong or Taiwan newspapers--are blocked by the government, the content of these publications still enters China through bulletin boards, mass emails to individual inboxes, and other online channels. These publications, such as alerts from the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, VOA news updates, and dissident newsletters, reach Chinese readers despite the government 's use of advanced filtering technology. Many books banned domestically in China are also available online, such as The Tiananmen Papers, Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, and the Bible.

Influencing Traditional Media

Commercial news portals such as Sina.com, Sohu.com, and Netease.com have become very popular among readers in China. Although they must get content from official news sources and lack the right to publish political news, their methods of collecting and presenting news are already changing traditional reporting in China, where editors and reporters must adhere to strict guidelines about what, how, when, and even if to report certain events. There are also increasing numbers of "self-media" (zi meiti) sites, run by individuals who use Weblog software to gather, organize, and spread news and commentary. The sites, such as no4media.org, blogchina.org, and hundreds of others, rely on readers' participation to spread community-related news or fact-check official media reports.

When covering a sensitive story in China--like a natural disaster, a major industrial accident, or an official corruption case--print reporters must follow the lead of official sources before conducting interviews and publishing their result. Journalists now evade these guidelines by distributing and collecting information online, making it more difficult for propaganda bosses to silence sensitive stories.

A recent example is an expose of corruption within the Hope Project, China's largest charity, which is operated by the Communist Youth League. The story was censored by the Guangzhou weekly Southern Weekend, but a journalist sent the report to overseas Internet media, which distributed it online. Such censored stories are now routinely distributed through email, chat rooms, and other methods, and they eventually find their way back into China. Once the story has reached the public via the Internet, the official media often feels pressure to report the story themselves. Thus, due to increasing pressure from Internet sources, the traditional media has been more responsive in reporting sensitive stories.

By freeing the public from dependence on official sources, the Internet is also shaping public opinion. When a major news event occurs, such as the changes in the PRC leadership at the 16th Communist Party Congress, Internet users compare, analyze, and balance the information they get from different sources, including the foreign media and overseas Chinese press in Hong Kong and Taiwan. At the outset of the current Severe Acute Respitory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China, the PRC government attempted to mask the severity of the disease by instituting a reporting ban for domestic media and denying access to international health inspectors.

The cover-up provoked widespread international condemnation that reached the Chinese public through the Internet. While the official media remained silent on the issue, Internet users distributed independent reports on the spread of the disease, criticizing the government cover-up and debating issues of government accounability. China's new leadership was eventually forced to acknowledge their role in the epidemic and take action against the disease.

The Virtual Public Sphere 

Before the Internet emerged as a source of information dissemination, the Chinese media was not a forum for public discussion and debate. Now the Internet facilitates discussion on public affairs, especially through online bulletin boards. The most popular Internet portals allow users to discuss current events by posting comments on bulletin boards or real-time chatrooms linked to specific news stories. Such discussions have become popular both in the private portals and on official websites such as People's Daily's popular Strong Nation Forum, which has more than 200,000 registered members. Normally, more than 10,000 users are online to participate in these discussions. According to an article recently posted on the Strong Nation Forum, the number of registered users for the top 10 bulletin boards, which focus on news and political affairs, range from 100,000 to 500,000, while the number of online users at any normal hour can reach 15,000.

All these online forums are closely monitored by China's Internet police, and their hosts meticulously control and censor comments to ensure that the discussion does not cross politically acceptable boundaries. However, because such forums remain the only place for widespread, efficient, and direct online communication, the bulletin boards have created a virtual public sphere that does not exist anywhere else in Chinese society. For China's Internet generation, it has become a crucial mode of identity and self-expression. Bulletin boards provide an alternative to the agenda set by the official press by allowing users, instead of propaganda officials, to determine the leading stories from domestic and overseas media.

This interaction between online news forums and the official media was recently demonstrated in a very public and positive way in Shenzhen, a southern PRC special economic zone. On November 16, 2002, an author using the online name "Crazy for You" posted a long essay titled "Shenzhen, Who Abandoned You?" on Strong Nation Forum and Development Forum, another popular bulletin board hosted by the official Xinhua News Agency website. The article outlined many existing problems with Shenzhen city government policy, including inefficiency, mismanagement of the residential certification system, and a poor investment environment.

The author, who was clearly very familiar with the inner workings of the government, wrote a thoughtful and well-documented piece that stayed within approved political boundaries. Nevertheless, such an independent and frank critique would not have been published by the official press. However, after publishing his piece online, the author received a tremendous amount of public support, which the government was unable to ignore or dismiss. The posting generated hundreds of responses. Many readers emailed it to friends nationwide, and it soon appeared on many official and semi-official websites across China. In an unprecedented response, the Shenzhen mayor met the author and publicly responded in the local official press to his criticisms, putting the issues discussed in the piece on the city policy reform agenda. This milestone demonstrates the Internet's power to be a positive force in broadening China's public discourse.

Internet-Facilitated Civil Society

The expanded space for discussion of public affairs facilitated by the Internet has thus allowed for the establishment of online communities that challenge government limitations, creating and fostering a space for civil society to push the boundaries of associative and communicative freedoms. While authorities effectively stifle a civil society of independent social organizations, grassroots groups that depart from the official agenda in covering environmental issues, women's rights, homosexuality, and other social issues often rely on the Internet to organize and distribute information. One important example is the website of AIDS activist Wan Yanhai's Aizhi Action group, one of the only independent sources of information in China on public health and AIDS. Because of the governments sensitivity toward the AIDS crisis, Wan's project is on the borderline of government tolerance, and he was arrested for a month in 2002. However, his website is still operating, and his organization has now received official ac ceptance, largely because of international attention to the issue.

As Wan's case illustrates, a powerful tension is developing between these nascent social forces which rely on the Internet for their existence and the government's determined efforts to keep the flow of information under control. China's 59 million "netizens" increasingly resist censorship mechanisms. As authorities stifle citizens' newly emerging freedom to express themselves and access information, many people who were indifferent to politics have been galvanized to defend their fundamental rights. And because their sense of identity has been fostered by the Internet's culture of free expression and individuality, they are willing to express their dissatisfaction publicly.

The Internet even provides an ideal forum for such agitation. When authorities blocked the Chinese version of Google--a popular Internet search engine-in September 2002, Internet users launched vehement online protests, that eventually led the government to compromise by allowing access to a modified version of the search engine.

Caught in the Net

One of the most visible examples of this online resistance is the widely circulated Declaration of Internet Citizens' Rights, which demands freedoms of expression, information, and association on the Internet, and was launched in July 2002 after the government announced new regulations enforcing self-censorship among Internet publishers. The authors quote from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights in defending their right to free expression. "A modern society is an open society," state the authors, "As the Chinese people again face a historic transition into a modern society any measure that closes China only harms China's emergence into the international community and Chinese society's peace and progress." Initiated by prominent writers, lawyers, and private webmasters, including Wan Yanhai, the declaration has now gained the support of more than 1,000 Web publishers, Internet users, and other Chinese netizens.

In a more recent example, Internet users have initiated a campaign to release a fellow Internet writer, Liu Di, a 22 year-old psychology student whose online pen name is "Stainless Steel Mouse." Liu's thoughtful, insightful, and humorous writing often challenged the political and social system, making her a popular commentator on China's largest online bulletin board, Xici Hutong, which has 500,000 registered users. In one essay she commented that the work of the Internet police was actually endangering national security by not allowing people to express themselves.

After she disappeared from the online forum in September 2002, her Internet friends investigated and discovered that she had been arrested on suspicion of "endangering national security." Her arrest triggered a global grassroots online campaign, and more than 2000 netizens--including many prominent Chinese writers and intellectuals who signed their real names--have signed a petition to the PRC government demanding her release. In a motion of solidarity, hundreds of online writers have put "Stainless Steel" in front of their online names, making Liu a powerful symbol of freedom of expression in China. In contrast to Wei Jingsheng, who was also sent to prison for his political writings, Liu Di did not have to wait 13 years for her supporters to send information to the world via a floating bottle. Rather, the Internet has enabled an immediate global grassroots movement in her name fighting for freedom of expression.

Thus far, the PRC government has managed to promote the development of the Internet for its economic benefits, while maintaining enough control over online information to prevent the collapse of the political regime. Simple predictions of whether the Internet will spark political transformation in China ignore the complex, unfolding dynamics between social forces and government control. While the long-term effects of the Internet on Chinese society are still difficult to assess, these emerging patterns of online interaction underline how information technology has already helped expand freedom of expression and broaden the public discourse under the authoritarian regime. As new technologies spread throughout the population, and as online civil society develops and matures, the Internet will play an increasingly powerful role, catalyzing greater changes toward a more open and democratic China.

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XIAO QIANG is Executive Director of Human Rights in China, a monitoring and advocacy organization based in New York and Hong Kong.