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China joined the global Internet in 1994. The Internet access became commercially available in 1995. In 1996, China had just less than 100,000 Internet users, 50,000 online computers and 1000 websites. 10 years later by the end of June, 2006, both of the Internet users and online computers have increased more than 4 orders of magnitude up to 123 and 55 millions, respectively, while the websites to near 0.8 millions.
The remarkable development of the Internet accesses and usages has certainly improved the quality of people's lives in China, including their freedom of expression at least technically. The freedom to write and publish on Internet appeared to be so near to reach for the Internet users as the detailed censorship and surveillance in advance of the publication and distribution on Internet have become more and more difficult and impractical if possible for such a huge increase in information flow. The independent writers, especially the cyber dissidents, who have had little chance to get their undesirable opinions heard in China in traditional way can easily find a lot of different opportunities to publish their writings on or through the Internet in a much wider world while generally facing less troubles or risks than their predecessors who had fought for their free expressions for years.
On the other hand, however, the governmental suppression on the Internet related activities in China has also be getting more effective and more severe with the development of information technology, especially with the increasing assistance and cooperation from the world's leading IT giants such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco to enhance the governmental control of the Internet in that police state. For instance, the dissident writers and free-minded journalists who are targeted by the government have been getting more effectively charged and more severely convicted for their Internet related activities, sometimes based on the evidences provided by the Internet companies such as Yahoo. The Internet censorship and surveillance have been getting more effective to block the access to and flow of the undesirable information and monitor the targeted Internet activities, especially with the cooperation of the Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo who have integrated the black list of certain words and terms into their search engines in China. Cisco has been in cooperation with China's Internet police and taken part in setting up the Great Firewall of China to filter the information flows passing through China's limited gateways to the globe Internet while Microsoft has shut down the blogs with the content offensive to the Chinese authorities in its MSN spaces even located beyond China.
On Feb. 14, one day before the US Congress hearing on the roles of the above US Companies in the Internet suppression in China, the Chinese government hold a press conference to clarify its stands and indirectly defend these companies as well.
The Resolution of the National People's Congress Standing Committee is a typical example of the abuse of law to suppress the freedom of expression on the Internet. The Resolution was adopted in Dec 28, 2002.
Mr. Guo Qinghai, an Honorary Member of PEN Canada, was the first victim of this resolution. Guo was arrested in September, 2000, merely for publicizing his political essays on the overseas Chinese website Democracy Forum, but unable to be prosecuted until the following March more than 2 months after the Resolution had been adopted. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison on the infamous charge of "inciting subversion of the State power" for his 27 articles published under his penname of Qing Song on the Internet and on several overseas magazines, which was the first case convicted mainly for the Internet activity and only based on writings since middle 1980s. Now, this kind of conviction has become dominant.
A public security information management and surveillance network named as Golden Shield is a comprehensive national project developed by the Ministry of Public Security since 1998. It started in partial use in 2002 and completed with its whole applications in 2004. Its censorship system has implemented variously by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. The firewall part of the system is known as the Great Firewall of China. The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at China's nine Internet gateways. It also selectively engages in DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested. The blocked websites and censored contents include:
- News from many overseas sources, especially websites which include forums or Chinese version, such as Hong Kong News, BBC Chinese, VOA, RFA, etc;
- Information about human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, religion, Tiananmen events of 1989, Taiwan, Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, well-known dissidents, etc. such as the websites of AI, HRW, ICPC, etc;
- The popular websites of the most overseas Chinese media and organizations, and the websites critical of Chinese leaders or those expressing political views different from the Chinese government.
Cyber Police is Wang-luo Jing-cha in Chinese, or more simplified as Wang Jing, and fully termed in China as the Special Police for Internet Security Inspection (Guoji Hulianwang Anquan Zhuanye Jiancha). According to their own publications, the cyber police started being organized as a branch of the police at the Public Security Bureau in several large cities since 1996. In the beginning, they were the technical officers working only at office or at laboratory.
In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security promoted the rank of this branch and established the Public Information Network Security Inspection Bureau and since then the departments/divisions with the same name at different police authorities in all of 31 provinces/municipals/autonomous regions, most of several hundreds prefectures/cities and thousands of counties/districts. Therefore, these officers are also termed as Network Inspectors (Wang-luo Jian-cha, or Wang Jian), some of whom are authorized to do the fieldworks as the patrol police officers or even criminal inspectors. Since the beginning of 2002, it started being transferred into a more independent special task force like the traffic police and criminal police by setting up the ranks of provincial contingent/city detachment/county brigade instead of departments/divisions. The cyber police in China now consist of more than 40,000 officers and have set up several hundreds of their own websites or homepages at different ranks. At some of their websites, there are even some carton images of the cyber police to ease the possible tension between ordinary netizens and police.
Since Jan 1, 2006, the cyber police in Shenzhen City, near Hong Kong, have gone further by personalizing the carton images of a policeman and a policewoman as their icons with their nicknames of Jingjing and Chacha, respectively (Jing-Cha means Police). This nice pair of the cyber police icons have not only got their respective homepages (http://66110.qzone.qq.com and http://777110.qzone.qq.com) but also are patrolling at the major websites and forums on the Internet in that city to remind very kindly the netizens to behave themselves as well as of their alarm services for the informants. In May, the Minister of Public Security decided that the cyber police in the big cities should follow the model of Shenzhen. As many critics emphasized, these two nice images of Internet patrol police may also hinted that the Internet world where many of the Internet users are trying to hide is actually a police state with even less privacy than in reality as one may always be watched at any time and anywhere, even in one's bedroom (For instance, the media in China recently reported a controversial case of the arrests of a man and a woman for showing each other their naked bodies in their respective bedrooms when chatting privately through MSN.).
Currently, the most noticeable appearance of the cyber police in China is their controls of the Internet cafes where more than one fourth of the Internet users now make their main online activities while more than two third do them at home. To avoid the cyber police to find the identity, many individuals in China used to getting and sending the information undesirable to the government at Internet café where no ID had been required. Since 2003, however, more and more local authorities ordered the Interne cafés to demand all of their customers to register real ID for the online activities. In 2004, nearly half of China's 200,000 Internet cafés were banded or closed by the police for various reasons while the rests had to install a surveillance software in their systems to track Internet users' online movements, keep records of their names, addresses and ID numbers, and more importantly, enable the police to perform the remote central monitoring and control of their Internet activities.
China is now the biggest totalitarian country in the world, where there exists the highest figure of writers in prison (WiP), estimated to have been up to hundreds of them even since the pro-democratic movement in 1989, if not counting those who had ever jailed since 1949. In recent years, the right to the freedom of expression has been continuously suppressed throughout the entirety of China, from its capital city of Beijing to the interior provinces of Sichuan and Hunan, the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao to the Autonomous Regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. During strengthening the Internet control, particularly, Chinese authorities have been increasingly persecuting the Internet writers (cyber-dissidents), and imprisoned over 80 writers and journalists according to the incomplete date collected by the human rights organizations.
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