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CHINESE CYBERSPACE:

THREAT TO OR MODEL FOR INTERNET?

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By David Kurt Herold

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The Montréal Review, April 2011

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"Online Society in China" (Routledge, 2001), Edited by David Kurt Herold and Peter Marolt

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Trying to talk or write about the Chinese Internet is a humbling, and ultimately frustrating exercise, as the writer is doomed to misrepresent, essentialize and belittle this astonishing 'place' full of contradictions. By early 2011, over 450 million Chinese, calling themselves 'wangyou' (Internet friend) or 'wangmin' (Internet citizen = netizen), have made online China the world's third largest 'place' by population - after offline China and India.

China's Internet is often dismissed as a censored and closely monitored - hence: dreary - place in which Chinese gold farmers slave away to obtain objects in online games that can be sold to rich, but lazy gamers in Europe and America, a place in which software, movie, and music pirates are allowed to run rampant, a place in which government-sponsored hackers are training to take over the online world, a place in which. even the mass media find it difficult to paint China's cyberspace consistently into the same corner while continuing to dismiss it.

Chinese cyberspace remains largely unknown to most people living in Europe or America, although its size, its vitality and energy, as well as the amount of well-planned interaction of the Chinese government with online China suggest that many of its emerging phenomena and practices might well carry over to the rest of the world some day. Not necessarily in the same form, but perhaps with similar guiding principles. Unless Internet users in Europe and America start paying attention and begin working towards their own vision of the future of Cyberspace, the often decried 'Chinese threat' might provide the model for the future of the world-wide Internet.

China's most popular blog has had over 460 million visitors so far, with half a million people signed up to follow every post, making the young race car driver, school leaver, and government critic (one of) the most read individual(s) on the planet. Chinese Internet companies routinely beat their Western competitors by first copying (some of) their ideas, then improving on them for the Chinese market, before driving the foreign Internet giants out of China. QQ is beating MSN and ICQ, Taobao is beating Ebay, Xiaonei and Renren are beating Facebook, Sina and Sohu are beating Yahoo, Tudou and Youku are beating YouTube, Sina Weibo is beating Twitter, and last, but not least, Baidu is beating Google. Lately, quite a few of them are making moves to reach the non-Chinese world as well, and to challenge these Internet giants on their home turf.

The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, doesn't announce his intention to run for re-election via email and twitter, but every netizen in China has been encouraged to write to him directly with problems and complaints that are answered online on a Government bulletin board system (BBS) displaying individual mail boxes for each member of China's top leadership. During the past three years China's premier, Wen Jiabao, has established the tradition of meeting netizens to elicit their concerns in an online chat before the annual sessions of the National People's Congress, where he then raised some of those issues. Over the past 10 years regulations have been issued to government authorities at all levels making it mandatory for officials to follow up on Internet rumors and complaints, and to answer them in a timely manner.

The infrastructure of the Internet, its servers and routers, cables and gateways, are owned not by private ISPs, but by the state and state-owned enterprises, giving the Chinese government a level of control that European and American authorities can only dream of. In 2009, they first 'switched off' the Internet to an entire province (Xinjiang) for a period of 6 months following unrest, then had an 'Internet' consisting of 20 websites created exclusively for the people of this one province for another 5 months, before allowing them to access the Internet in its entirety again. Yet government officials did not interfere, when the creator of this system of controls over the Chinese Internet, China's so-called 'Father of the Great Fire-Wall', was forced to close and delete his micro-blog on Sina Weibo within hours of opening his account due to the flood of criticism it attracted from netizens, which threatened to overwhelm the site's servers. Government officials in several provinces have arranged for 'representatives' of China's netizens to conduct official, independent investigations of criminal cases which had drawn online attention. Hundreds of government or Communist party officials have lost their jobs or been imprisoned on the basis of online rumors. Online lynch-mobs have repeatedly received the approval of even the Chinese central government in their attacks of ordinary citizens as well as of government and Party officials.

The government's censorship of sensitive topics and phrases affects all online postings, making it difficult for netizens to talk about many issues the government regards as sensitive. Netizens, however, have taken advantage of the small number of possible syllables of the Chinese language and its resultant large number of homophones to substitute forbidden or sensitive words with others that sound the same. In one popular example netizens discuss the adventures of an evil river crab wearing three wristwatches, with the "river crab" being a homophone of president Hu Jintao's ideal Confucian "harmonious" society, while the three "wristwatches" sound like the former president Jiang Zemin's political theory of the three "represents". Nevertheless, surveys have repeatedly shown that Chinese netizens are in principle for the control and supervision of Internet content by government authorities - they just wish for a fairer, less corrupt system.

In a Government White Paper, published in June 2010, the Chinese government outlined their vision of the future of the global Internet, not as the relatively unregulated space it still is today, to which the governments of different countries are always reacting with narrow, ad-hoc regulations, guidelines and laws, but rather as an 'Internet' of nationally-regulated networks. Arguing that the Internet has become an essential part of the economic, military, etc. well-being of a country, they suggest that it is only natural to assume that each country will have to regulate, protect, and supervise its own 'Internet', while connections between countries would have to be brought under the supervision of the United Nations subject to international treaties between the 'Internets' of sovereign countries. The Internet would thus follow the same path of development as the concepts of the 'nation' or the 'country' in the 19 th century.

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Online China is an exciting 'space' that challenges many of the pre-conceived notions non-Chinese have about China. It is a thriving place filled with entertainment, information exchanges, political and non-political debates, grotesqueries, etc. It is also a place, which the Chinese government insists on regulating by supervising and periodically pruning it, and by controlling its connection to the outside world in the interest of China's "legitimate national interests".

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David Kurt Herold is a Lecturer for Sociology in the Department for Applied Social Sciences (APSS) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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