We are witnessing the birth of a new kind of internet censorship in the Xinjiang province of Western China: the kind where a web site must be specifically allowed, instead of specifically disallowed.

China’s largest province was disconnected from the world completely, including a shutdown of phones and SMS, after hundreds of people were killed in separatist protests by the Uyghur minority people in July. Today, the Far West Blog reports that 27 more web sites have been allowed through the previously complete internet block. Wow. A whole 27. That brings the total number of extra-provincial sites accessible to Xinjiang residents to 31, and all of them are inside China.

The Chinese government maintains that the US-based “World Uyghur Congress” instigated the riots from overseas using the internet and SMS. No communications, no riots, the logic goes. And perhaps this is true, if myopic (fascinating debate on this here).

But there is something very wrong about opening up sites one by one like this, despite the fact that state-run Xinhua news agency is playing it up as communications being “restored”. The current Xinjian policy represents a new and extremely troubling flavor of censorship: rather than some sites being blocked, some sites are allowed. This is a white list, as opposed to the usual black list; the default is now “no”. Bearing in mind that personal satellite dishes are illegal in China, this means the government has complete control over the information that people are exposed to. This is just like the pre-internet era in any number of times and places, really, but that doesn’t make it any better.

At least text messaging, including international text messaging, was restored two weeks ago.

According to Far West Blog, here is what you now get from the outside world if you live in Xinjiang:

• 7 News Sites (including China Daily and CCTV)
• 4 Travel Sites (including Ctrip and Air China)
• 3 Business & Finance Sites
• 3 Telecom Sites (all three major Chinese carriers)
• 2 Shopping Sites (including Taobao, China’s version of eBay)
• 2 Computer Service Sites (so you can update your anti-virus)
• 2 Gaming Sites (more flash games…yippee)
• 2 Education Sites (study materials for students and help for teachers)
• 1 Fashion Site

Yes, this also means no IM, no Skype, no email, no nothing outside of the province. “I have had to sit here and endure a frustrating feeling that we are now living in the stone ages,” says Far West Blog writer Josh.

These 31 sites seem ridiculously limited, and these limits (no email!) would severely hamper business in the affluent Eastern provinces. Xinjiang has only 20 million people, so perhaps China can more or less do without it for a while. But what if the national firewall let through only, say, the top 10,000 or 100,000 currently uncensored international sites? How much easier it would be to prevent some pesky overseas message board from cropping up to corrupt Chinese minds! Why, your world-censoring work would practically be done for you, and almost no one would be the wiser.

Let’s hope that this isn’t a precedent.

UPDATE: There are rumours, based on government statements in December, that a national whitelist is planned. Nothing definitive yet.

I want to modify the open source, multiplatform, iPhone capable Spaz client so that it has a mode to automatically translate all tweets into the user’s chosen language.

I had intended to do this myself. But I’ve discovered that I’m back in graduate school full time, so I’m looking for a collaborating programmer who wants to do the majority of the coding. If you have some programming skill and you want to get into web apps, drop me a line!

But mostly, you’ll do this because you think that the world needs better multi-lingual communication. In particular, you want people to be able to keep track of news from places with oppressive internet censorship regimes (Iran, China, some Middle East), and you want the people who live there to be able to have public, real-time conversations with the rest of the world.

(Getting an uncensored internet connection in these places, one that can actually reach Twitter, is a different problem. But believe me, that problem has an active community around it.)

Spaz is written in Adobe Air and will need to call the Google Translate APIs.

In America, the enemy is Terrorism. It used to be the Russians, or more generically Communists. We discussed the history of this concept in class today. And then I asked: In the state-controlled Chinese media, who is the enemy today?

I got three immediate answers:

“The West.”

“Japan.”

“Separatists.” (E.g. Tibetans, Uighurs.)

There was instant consensus on this list, among the PRC students. Good to know.

The “Pillar of Shame” is faces: faces in agony, anonymous faces, dead faces. It stands in the plaza of the Student Union of the University of Hong Kong as a monument to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in which hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by the Chinese government. It was installed by students on the tenth anniversary of this sorry event, and the police did not stop them.

This would never fly on the mainland. In China, web searches, blog posts, foreign news broadcasts, and even instant messages about the Tiananamen Square massacre are very closely censored. To erect a monument to something that officially did not happen is unthinkable, not to mention severely punishable.

But Hong Kong is different.

The island was a British colony by treaty with the Chinese for 100 years. The 1997 handover to the Chinese government was peaceful, and Hong Kong became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” This means that it is under different law. In effect, the Hong Kong Basic Law — drafted jointly by the British and Chinese in the late 1980s — is a completely different constitution for the region. Hong Kong and China even require different entry visas and have different immigration procedures. In particular, mainland Chinese residents are not allowed to live here permanently.

And they might want to! Hong Kong residents enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and guarantees against unwarranted search or detention. The chief executive is not democratically elected, but the legislative council is. The internet is not censored and the economy is officially capitalist.

This arrangement provides a strange vantage point for China observers; it’s China, but also not-China. It’s free, and you can do things here you could never get away with on the mainland. For example, Rebecca MacKinnon of the University of Hong Kong has published some wonderful research on the Chinese internet censorship regime.

The Basic Law is guaranteed by the PRC for 50 years, until 2047. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

[Update May 6 17:00: added information on the context within China's overall internet censorship.]

The thing about censorship is that, when done well, no one really knows what’s being censored. This is why last week’s leaked documents from Baidu, the largest Chinese-langauge search engine and blogging site, are so titillating. Maybe someone screwed up bad, or maybe someone on the inside had an attack of transparency; whatever the reason, we now have a huge pile of documents detailing Baidu’s censorship policy during the period from November 2008 to March 2009. 

Whee!

The documents, now safely ensconed in a permanent home on Wikileaks, reveal for the first time a detailed inventory of the Chinese government’s priorities for, er, harmonization. There is a blacklist of 798 specific URLs, most of which seem to be recent news articles and discussion forum posts on sites both inside and outside of China. Far more interesting is a long list of sensitive keywords. Included policy documents suggest that the appearance of any of these terms in a blog post triggers a manual review by the staff of Baidu’s censorship team — whose names are listed in another of the leaked documents! While some of these topics have long been outright censored, such as “Tiananmen Square,” others are more general categories to be watched. Taken together, these sensitive terms are a fascinating portrait of China’s institutional paranoia.

Some categories are obvious, such as “Taiwan” and “naked chat”. Other areas are shockingly broad, such as “power” and “tyranny.”  Certain media outlets such as Voice of America are considered unacceptable, and “SMS the answer” is forbidden within the “exam information” section. Also, China does not have any ketamine, AIDS, or ethnic conflict, and frowns upon one night stands. The main document of interest begins,

近期重点监控信息

中办发 国办发 温州 鬼村 段桂清 四川广安 广安事件
中组部前部长直言 动物园 集会 涿州 饲养基地 中石油国家电网倒数 张文中 华闻 王政
假冒 记签 校园改造工程 雍战胜 死刑现场 冯巩 陶虹 高勤荣

And I can’t read that either, so below is an automated translation, via The Dark Visitor who clearly used something more formidable than Google Translate. Still, machine translation really doesn’t work as well as one might like, or perhaps “electric chicken” makes perfect sense in context.

Continue Reading »

Liu Xiaobo is now imprisoned at an uknown location for his involvement in the Charter ‘08 document

On December 10, 2008, a group of 300 Chinese dissidents published an open letter (english translation) to the Chinese government  calling for wide political freedoms and basic human rights in their country. Although this document has become the vegetarian dinner party topic du jour among Western activists, it’s not at all clear whether it will have any impact in China. For one thing, the Chinese government has censored it, removing it from Baidu and Google and even individual blogs. The internet being the internet, people are reading and talking about it anyway, but this only matters if the Chinese populace in general is sympathetic to the notion of government reform and greater personal rights. They may not be.

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When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave this speech in 1961, decrying the state of the medium that many had hoped would bring new light to humanity. What is to say that the Internet will not sink into the same mediocrity?

There are differences, of course. The internet is (currently) very much an active, two-way medium; the internet is (currently) a very democratic place, where anyone can espouse their worldview to the whole world for only the effort of typing. And the internet is (currently) far too large and diverse to be effectively controlled by any particular corporate or goverment interest.

But I have a morbid interest in dystopia; and already I see signs that not everyone realizes what freedoms we could lose. Like bad science fiction, here are a few scenarios where the internet fails to live up to its almost obscene promise, where it becomes just another “vast wasteland.”

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There was an ad on the Muni, on the 30 through Chinatown, printed in English and Chinese. It was a public service announcement, warning people to beware of hustlers selling fake visas. Among other things, there was a bullet point that said,

Don’t believe anyone who says ‘we know people at the immigration service and can get your papers done quickly.

I imagine talking to a Chinese immigrant about this. I imagine their confusion. “But,” my friend Ming says, “it is very difficult to get a visa. If they know someone, this solves the problem.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I’d tell him.

Ming blinks his confusion. How can it not work like that? Continue Reading »

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE) it looks like this:

I captured this from an internet cafe in Dubai in November, 2007, when I tried to navigate to flickr.com. Click for a larger image; the text reads, in Arabic and English, “We apologize [sic] the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” I must say it was something of a shock. If you live in what is commonly known as “Western Civilization”, you’ve probably never run into a censored page before. As with all personal experience, if you don’t see it yourself it’s very easy to forget that it exists at all.

But internet censorship does exist. It’s very real. In fact, something like one third of the governments of the world censor their citizens’ internet access. Given that this includes India and (especially) China, it may be that half the people people in the world can’t actually see what Americans, Canadians, Europeans and so on experience as “the internet.” Continue Reading »