The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

tenced in 2003 to 10 years in a labor camp for having “incited subversion with online treatises” critical of the government. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S., claims that Yahoo turned over data on as many as 60 other people. Yahoo says it condemns the sup- pression of free speech, but must comply with local laws. The company notes that as governments are not required to say why they want certain information, it has no way of knowing how the responses will be used. Although the PRC deals swiftly and harshly with people it views as disrupting what it calls the “healthy and orderly” online world, overall censorship of the Web in China is uneven. The strength of censorship seems to wax and wane as the govern- ment struggles to balance economic interests and political control. This was illustrated in May when it with- drew a measure requiring all bloggers to register with their real names. (It was made optional after Internet companies pointed out the logistical nightmare of cross-checking people’s names with the Public Security Bureau. According to the official Xinhua news service, China has more than 20 million bloggers.) PRC officials are well aware of the economic potential of the Web, which has helped spark healthy domestic online gaming and software indus- tries, among others. In 2000, the volume of e-commerce within China was already estimated at $9.3 billion, and information and communication technology is the fastest-growing sector in its economy. There are approximately 137 mil- lion Internet users in China out of a population of 1.3 billion, or about 10.5 percent. The Internet penetration rate varies greatly by region, however: in large cities 25 percent or more of residents may be online, while in the countryside that number drops to less than 10 percent. Experts estimate that for at least 30 percent of Internet users their main access point is a wangba — literally “Web bar” — which usually charges about 5 renminbi, or less than 75 cents, for an hour’s worth of high-speed Internet access. In 2000 there were only 16 computers per 1,000 people in China, compared to nearly 600 in the U.S. Nearly 60 percent of Internet users there are men, and 35 percent of users are 18 to 24 years old. Known officially as the “Golden Shield Project,” China’s Internet security project is often referred to in the West as “The Great Firewall of China.” It is relatively uncoordinated (sites may be accessible in one city but blocked in another, for example), and many government regulations about the Web are routinely ignored by Internet users and not enforced by security officials. According to a 2003 Harvard study, the list of blocked Web sites is not static, but at any given time as many as 50,000 sites may be in- accessible. Many different methods are employed, especially IP blocking (denying access to the exact string of numbers that identifies a computer or server on the Internet). E-mails may also be censored. Volunteers patrol chat rooms and message boards, deleting “objection- able” text and reporting users. People are encouraged to report gaps they find in the firewall. In addition, Chinese tend to prac- tice a form of self-censorship, refrain- ing from airing controversial views or visiting Web sites on sensitive subjects. Surveys show that relatively few users try to access proxy servers (which bounce the request for a blocked site though multiple servers in other countries), and the most- visited sites are nearly all gaming sites. 12 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 C Y B E R N O T E S