30 000 Police Monitor Blogs in China

I am not sure how accurate this claim is; that 30 000 police monitor Blogs in China, but it is form the Guardian, which is a pretty reliable if not at times a predictably narrow publication. When will big Western media realise that the Cold War is over and it is now safe to take a more sophisticated view of other nations and the political circumstances in which they operate?’ The West’ only sees what is wants to see and the billion plus people in China probably don’t care. And Australia is the ‘world’s biggest censor’ because our increasingly reductive notion of free speech primarily priveledges the strategically ill informed over those who have taken a more difficult journey of discovery. Don’t give the ‘common man’ an opinion; give them a meta-structure! Don’t give them one blog; give them a million. There is a Western myth that the more Information that is available, that the more politically enaged will be the citizen. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this is true and in fact, the opposite may be true. When someone is faced by ‘too much’ information, they will probably only seek out what they already know.

Jonathan Watts in Jinan
Wednesday January 25, 2006
The Guardian

Google, the world’s biggest search engine, will team up with the world’s
biggest censor, China, today with a service that it hopes will make it more
attractive to the country’s 110 million online users.
After holding out longer than any other major internet company, Google will
effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it
starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not
approve of.

Despite a year of soul-searching, the American company will join Microsoft
and Yahoo! in helping the communist government block access to websites
containing politically sensitive content, such as references to the
Tiananmen Square massacre and criticism of the politburo.

Executives have grudgingly accepted that this is the ethical price they have
to pay to base servers in mainland China, which will improve the speed – and
attractiveness – of their service in a country where they face strong
competition from the leading mandarin search engine, Baidu.

But Google faces a backlash from free speech advocates, internet activists
and politicians, some of whom are already asking how the company’s policy in
China accords with its mission statement: to make all possible information
available to everyone who has a computer or mobile phone.

The new interface – google.cn – started at midnight last night and will be
slowly phased in over the coming months. Although users will have the option
of continuing to search via the original US-based google.com website, it is
expected that the vast majority of Chinese search enquiries will go through
mainland-based servers.

This will require the company to abide by the rules of the world’s most
restricted internet environment. China is thought to have 30,000 online
police monitoring blogs, chatrooms and news portals. The propaganda
department is thought to employ even more people, a small but increasing
number of whom are paid to anonymously post pro-government comments online.
Sophisticated filters have been developed to block or limit access to
“unhealthy information”, which includes human rights websites, such as
Amnesty, foreign news outlets, such as the BBC, as well as pornography. Of
the 64 internet dissidents in prison worldwide, 54 are from China.

Google has remained outside this system until now. But its search results
are still filtered and delayed by the giant banks of government servers,
known as the great firewall of China. Type “Falun Gong” in the search engine
from a Beijing computer and the only results that can be accessed are
official condemnations.

Now, however, Google will actively assist the government to limit content.
There are technical precedents. In Germany, Google follows government orders
by restricting references to sites that deny the Holocaust. In France, it
obeys local rules prohibiting sites that stir up racial hatred. And in the
US, it assists the authorities’ crackdown on copyright infringements.

The scale of censorship in China is likely to dwarf anything the company has
done before. According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are
the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs:
cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party. But this list
is frequently updated.

In a statement, Google said it had little choice: “To date, our search
service has been offered exclusively from outside China, resulting in
latency and access issues that have been unsatisfying to our Chinese users
and, therefore, unacceptable to Google. With google.cn, Chinese users will
ultimately receive a search service that is fast, always accessible, and
helps them find information both in China and from around the world.”

It acknowledged that this ran contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a
greater good was served by providing information in China. “In order to
operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results
available on google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy.
While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission,
providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts
to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

Initially, Google will not use Chinese servers for two of its most popular
services: Gmail and blogger. This is a reflection of the company’s
discomfort with the harsh media environment – and the subsequent risks to
its corporate image.

In an attempt to be more transparent than its rivals, Google said it would
inform users that certain web pages had been removed from the list of
results on the orders of the government. But its motivation is economic: a
chunk of the fast-growing Chinese search market, estimated to be worth $151m
(£84m) in 2004. This is still small by US standards, but with the number of
web users increasing at the rate of more than 20 million a year, the online
population is on course to overtake the US within the next decade.

Julian Pain of Reporters Without Borders – a freedom of expression advocacy
group that also has its website blocked in China – accused Google of
hypocrisy. “This is very bad news for the internet in China. Google were the
only ones who held out. So the Chinese government had to block information
themselves. But now Google will do it for them,” he said. “They have two
standards. One for the US, where they resist government demands for personal
information, and one for China, where they are helping the authorities block
thousands of websites.”

Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. “What Google are
doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues,” said
one of the country’s most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted
Killer. “That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt
they are cowards.”

Forbidden searches

Words or phrases that can trigger pages to be blocked or removed from search
results:

Tiananmen Square massacre
The killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians by the People’s
Liberation Army in 1989

Dalai Lama
The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, who is denounced as a splittist by the
government in Beijing

Taiwanese independence
The nightmare of the Communist party, which has vowed to use force to
prevent a breakaway

Falun Gong
A banned spiritual movement, thousands of whose members have been imprisoned
and in many cases tortured