China's internet: A giant cage

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21574628-internet-was-expected-help-democratise-china-instead-it-has-enabled

by colinismyname • 13 years ago

31 27 13 years ago

economist.com

elvinj• 13 years ago

I think that in the overall scheme of things having a limited internet is better than no Internet. Having said that I think the chinese peope should strive for a fully free Internet in china. I know easier said than done.. While working with engineers in China they had FB, which they would access through vpns. And proxies. Hopefully the day would come soon when do wouldn't have to resort to that or fear of the consequences of what they write.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

There is no choice of "no internet" for them. Oil countries can switch it off and never notice, but China without internet will have to part with half of those sweet sweet (and regime-supporting) growth percents.

That's because business communication will be ruined (or won't develop in the first place) and orders will go somewhere else.

In fact, they will need a commerce pimp - some party with internet (HK?) that makes deals for them and gives them a fraction of money.

So no, they don't actually have the "no internet" option.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

I think that part of their success is because China a non-religious tyranny.

Muslim countries can't do it because of their hypocritical nature they try to ban and regulate everything, including things not related to regime's survival. They set absolutely unrealistic bar and never hit it.

On the other hand, Chinese regime is very pragmatic. They offer their internet where they only change a little. This they can do without making the whole thing unusable.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

"I think that part of their success is because China a non-religious tyranny."

China's tyranny is religious. Their religion is called "communism", is not that people in China is free to believe what they want.

If you go to China you will see that family is very strong there, altars for dead family members are in lots of houses.

adventured3• 13 years ago

More specifically they worship the state. They replace god with that (compared to theocracies).

Communism is a mystical collectivist ideology, that proclaims the magic will of the people can make the impossible, possible. It pretends to bring reality under the rule of the subjective whim, such that if enough people believe something then it will be so. That's classic doctrine however, and it's questionable how much of that style of Communism still exists in China, they seem to be far more practical in their application.

dsfasfasf• 13 years ago

>>Their religion is called "communism"

Oh come off it.

knowaveragejoe• 13 years ago

The Chinese and other regimes have done much scarier things than simple censorship by leveraging the power the Internet gives them:

http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what...

Wonderdonkey• 13 years ago

As I was reading this, I kept thinking, Is this a satire of the American government? But no, it was just some jingoistic piece singling out one foreign country.

I accept that the Chinese government is terrible. It's the incredulous "it would never happen in The Free World™" tone of the article that pisses me off.

Do people believe the government doesn't shut down or freeze individual sites at will? Been on 4chan today?

Do people really believe the Chinese government has jailed more people for expression on the Internet than the United States government? Do people believe the U.S. government isn't monitoring or manipulating the Internet? Back doors? Warrantless surveillance? Lurking? Subpoenas for user information without so much as a judge's signature? FISA? NDAA? CISPA? Does the FBI not track people or pay personal visits to people who say the wrong thing on Facebook or YouTube or any other social site?

I know we can express more here in the United States than people can in China, but I really think the feds are using the entire Internet as one giant honeypot right now, and the lid's just waiting to come down. We know the FBI collects information on non-criminal activities both in the real world and on the Internet in the event that those activities become illegal in the future. (Gore sites, for example, are being watched. It's not illegal to post gore. But when it becomes illegal, the FBI will have a list of all those people who posted on the clear Web.)

Do you know how easy it would be for the government to shut down the entire Internet in America? You have a few wireless operators, all heavily beholden to the federal government. You have a few cable and telco monopolies. Their executives and board members are all interchangeable, all part of the same sphere of influence — essentially a telecommunications cadre. This isn't accidental.

I say 10 friendly phone calls from the federal government could get 90 percent of the Internet shut down in this country inside of an hour.

Anyway, they haven't done it here yet. But that's about the only thing that distinguishes us from them.

jacoblyles• 13 years ago

Ugh, a false equivalence attack to defend the policy of censors. Just because the American government does bad things doesn't let others off the hook.

And most of your accusations are evidence-free assertions and conspiracy theories.

adventured3• 13 years ago

"I say 10 friendly phone calls from the federal government could get 90 percent of the Internet shut down in this country inside of an hour."

While we're talking about crazy things that would never happen... the US could have relentlessly nuked the Soviets after Japan immediately post WW2 (by rushing the further development of lots of more nukes) and ruled the planet for a few hundred years with an iron fist by threatening to obliterate any nation that even thought about acquiring nukes or related tech.

That didn't happen either, because it'd have been insane.

The US Govt. couldn't shut down 90% of the Internet in the US because it can't afford to do so, both due to the extraordinary outrage and financial costs involved. Aka it'd be insane to do it, and would be like committing political suicide for the politicians that desperately cling to power.

Lots of stupid things are possible, so what. The US Govt. could have shut down the Internet in 1995 too. And they could go on a murderous rampage with mini nukes targeting each metro in the nation. That's about as likely as the Feds shutting down the golden goose.

Volpe2• 13 years ago

In 2000 would you have said "The US could setup a prison just outside its borders so it could ignore the bill of rights, but it wouldn't - because that would be insane!?"

The US has been doing some pretty insane things... Yes they haven't Nuked half the planet, but that pretty far down the spectrum of 'insane'... Shutting down, or heavily censoring the internet is not...

You do recall what happened to wikileaks in the US, right? Some phone calls, and Amazon shuts their servers down....

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

"the US could have relentlessly nuked the Soviets after Japan immediately post WW2"

They didn't have enough nukes neither they had delivery methods. Japan is a tiny island, but most of Soviet industry were located on the Volga rived and beyond on the Ural mountains. That's very far from sea and very far from any territory USA reliably controls. I don't think they had strategic bombers that could reliably take dozens of targets off. And contemporary bombs were small-powered devices that wouldn't destroy everything.

They will only make Soviets very angry and the rest of the world hating and fearing them.

Add to this that Europe would hardly be friendly if they did that, seeing themself as a next target. Will hardly help them deliver nukes.

contingencies4• 13 years ago

Mostly fair points... you don't deserve to get downvoted so heavily. As one of the probably few people here who has spent significant time living in China (first trip: 2001, last trip: less than a month ago, total time: 7-8 years), and has also lived in various parts of the west (Australia, UK, US), I agree with you that the west isn't much better.

For more discussion on why this absolutely is the case, see (1) the Cypherpunks interviews at http://assange.rt.com/ (2) the longer-form Cypherpunks book at http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/ (3) Bruce Schneier's recent essay at http://www.schneier.com/essay-420.html (which actually evidences some of the same) (4) Applebaum's 29C3 keynote at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5OQz0Ko8c (5) Echelon as best we knew it through the eyes of multiple intelligence agencies 12 years ago: http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm (6) ... if you get this far, you will find more sources on your own.

gbog2• 13 years ago

About freedom of speech, I read in Antifragile that a university dean has been fired because he said a possible explanation for gender inequality in high and low grounds ( academia and prisons) could be that women have a more stable psyché.

adventured3• 13 years ago

Given how old, large, and diverse the entirety of Chinese culture is, if it takes 50 years for the Internet to gradually open up their society and system of government, it's still a big win. I view it as a matter of time, not if.

contingencies4• 13 years ago

I might buy the Economist this week to read the rest of this report (it seems this was only the introduction).

As someone who has spent a decade or so in China, I believe that practically speaking the most obvious measure of control to anyone on the ground inside of the country (and one that is not mentioned in the article) is bandwidth limitation.

Quite simply, international links are huge lossy choke-points that make international services so painful to use that you may as well clone one inside the country... which will be more readily legally threatened and manipulated by the state. Combined with purposefully weak intellectual property law, this in and of itself is a masterful extension of soft power by the party.

(PS. The map of internet penetration statistics looks to me to be largely bullshit. Internet penetration for urbanites is far greater than 100%, with the average urban family having at least one internet-connected cellphone each, more than one tablet device, etc. In smaller areas, people tend to use internet cafes more often, which hides true penetration statistics.)

seanmcdirmid4• 13 years ago

I would buy the Economist this week to read this report, but I'm sure the pages have been ripped out by the authorities. Thankfully, we get full access to the Economist at work.

> As someone who has spent a decade or so in China, I believe that practically speaking the most obvious measure of control ... is bandwidth limitation.

This was true before 2009, but the situation became much worse after the Olympics when they actually blocked many of the sites we care about. VPNs are being attacked these days by the GFW as well, or anything that runs over https (reading hackernews is becoming harder).

contingencies4• 13 years ago

> the situation became much worse after the Olympics when they actually blocked many of the sites we care about. VPNs are being attacked these days by the GFW as well

My experience was that 2012 was the year they really broke the internet with some forms of rate limiting and other attacks against VPN protocol streams. I found over the last few months the fastest/simplest way to get reliable arbitrary HTTP(S) links from within the country on IPv4 was to use SSH with port forwarding to a squid proxy, ie: ssh -N -L localport:tertiaryhost:tertiaryport user@server ... then configure your browser to use 127.0.0.1:localport as a proxy. The old OpenVPN-based methodology was far too unstable. Tor has been effectively cut, unless you do the email-hoop-jumping secret and possibly short-lived endpoint request process and then put up with absolutely pitiful performance.

I suspect IPv6 solves most of the current issues; unfortunately my shot at getting it to work for this purpose didn't succeed, perhaps due to crappy NAT devices.

Anyway, I got sick of China's hassle (and economic bubble pricing vs. reducing quality of life, re: pollution of all kinds, visa hassles, etc.) for the moment, so moved to Thailand. Internet is so much better here.

gbog2• 13 years ago

Have been living and working in China since 10 years. This article is a good typical case of China misunderstanding. Example:

> Chinese private internet companies, many of them clones of Western ones, have been allowed to flourish so long as they do not deviate from the party line.

There is not one party line that everyone follows, this was true 30 years ago but isn't anymore. What we have is a blurry moving red line delimiting the topics that will trigger censorship.

Germany and France also have censorship. The difference is in the protected topics, the number of them and the blurrynesss of the lines.

vorg• 13 years ago

> There is not one party line that everyone follows

That's because governments, both China and the US, is made up of people with opinions. The sort of people that get themselves into government are the same types of people who use the internet to keep power.

And not just in governments like the US and China, but also startups, VC funds, IT consulting companies, etc. These same types of people create lots of pseudonym logins on Hacker News to influence opinion about their products and services, another form of internet control.

China's internet: A giant cage

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