Part I
Webmaster Finds Gaps in China's Net
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 24, 2004; Page A01
GUANGZHOU, China -- When Wu Wei's Web site was shut down for the 23rd time, police in the western Chinese city of Chengdu replaced it with one of their own. For a few days last summer, people trying to reach his Democracy and Freedom discussion forum instead found an odd message in large red characters on their computer screens.
"Because this site contains illegal information," the message said, "the webmaster is asked to quickly contact Officer Hu of the Chengdu Public Security Bureau Internet Supervision Department." Helpfully, the officer left a phone number.
Wu, 34, a part-time college lecturer living hundreds of miles away in Guangzhou on China's southeast coast, ignored the request. But users across the country called and berated Officer Hu for closing the site.
Wu said the officer eventually called his cell phone and offered to reopen the site if he turned over data that could help police identify people who had posted essays there.
Wu refused. Instead, he found another company, in another city, selling space on the Internet for personal Web pages. And five days after it was closed, the Democracy and Freedom site was online again.
The authorities have shut down, blocked, hacked or otherwise incapacitated Wu's Web site 38 times in the past three years, repeatedly disrupting the discussions it hosts on political reform, human rights and other subjects the ruling Chinese Communist Party considers taboo. Each time the site has been closed, though, Wu and the friends who help him run it have found a way to open it again.
Their cat-and-mouse game with the country's cyberpolice highlights the unique challenge the Internet poses to the party as it struggles to build a free-market economy while preserving the largest authoritarian political system in the world. It also illustrates how the bounds of permissible speech in China are blurring.
Nearly three decades after the death of Mao Zedong, Chinese enjoy greater personal freedom than ever before under Communist rule, and they routinely criticize the government in private without fear. But people are increasingly using the Internet to broadcast their opinions in public, challenging a key pillar of the party's rule -- its ability to control news, information and public debate.
The party is swift to jail some people who criticize senior leaders or express dissent on sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square massacre; at least 55 people are in Chinese prisons on charges related to their Web postings. But others who express the same views go unpunished, because police officers are sometimes apathetic about tracking them down and local Internet businesses are often more interested in attracting customers than enforcing vague rules.
More than 80 million people use the Internet in China, according to official surveys, and the figure has been doubling every 18 months. Unlike authoritarian governments elsewhere, China's rulers have chosen to promote Internet access, aiming to nurture a tech-savvy workforce, stimulate economic growth and improve government efficiency.
But the Internet has become the most unpredictable and difficult to control of the nation's mass media. While Chinese newspapers, radio and television stations are all owned by the state and must follow the party's orders, the country's most popular Web sites are privately owned, driven by profit to expand their audiences and less strictly regulated by government censors. These Web sites are at the cutting edge of an epic struggle unfolding in China today between the authoritarian state and those seeking more freedom.
Several times, the sites have drawn national attention to incidents of perceived injustice, prompting ordinary people to flood the Internet with angry messages. In a country where public demonstrations are forbidden, the government has felt compelled to respond to these online protests. In one case, after an outcry over the death of a young college graduate in police custody, it repealed a decades-old law giving police wide-ranging power to detain people not carrying their residency permits.
Worried about these challenges, the leadership ordered tighter controls on news Web sites this year. The government has also upgraded the technology it uses to block content from overseas and, according to the state media, has begun to install new surveillance software in Internet cafes. Nationwide, China employs an estimated 30,000 people to enforce vague regulations against using the Web to spread rumors, organize cults or disseminate "harmful information."
"The most important battleground for freedom of speech in China is on the Internet now. The authorities realize that, and they are trying to suppress it," Wu said recently, peering at his smudged computer screen and giving a tour of his Web site. "At the same time, we are continuously challenging their bottom line, and pushing them back. . . . This is a critical time."
A New World
A trim man with a wide, square face and large glasses that sit a little too low on his nose, Wu talks fast, with a thick Cantonese accent. His tiny apartment holds only a bed and a small desk for a computer he assembled himself. A plastic cup he uses as an ashtray sits near his keyboard, and newspapers are taped on the only window to keep the sun from overheating the room. The neighborhood is a slum, located far from the college where Wu teaches a class on public administration once a week, and even farther from the factory where his wife works. But the couple chose the room because the rent was cheap and the landlord had wired the building for high-speed Internet access.
The eldest son of party officials, Wu joined the Communist Youth League in middle school and had planned to join the party in college because he believed it was China's best hope for a democratic and prosperous future. But as a freshman, he participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations that swept the nation in 1989, and changed his mind about the party after the Tiananmen massacre.
Wu had his own brush with the power of the state. During the crackdown, party officials demanded he identify teachers who led protests at his university, threatening to kick him out of school if he refused, Wu recalled. After several days of questioning, Wu gave them a name. He immediately regretted it, and decided then he would never give in like that again.
After graduating, Wu was assigned a job in a local office in charge of libraries and bookstores. He was frustrated and bored, until one day in 1998 a colleague introduced him to the Internet. Before long, Wu stumbled onto bulletin board sites hosting lively discussions on history, politics and current affairs. At first, Wu said, he only read what others had posted. But he was drawn into a new world.
When a popular discussion site was shut down in June 2001, he and two doctoral students he met online decided to launch the Democracy and Freedom forum, using a free bulletin board site. "I felt if I didn't speak out, I might not speak forever," recalled Wu, who adopted the Internet name Yedu, from a Tang Dynasty poem describing an empty boat on a river in the wilderness.
The new forum drew hundreds of visitors daily. Wu and his friends moderated debates on such sensitive subjects as President Jiang Zemin's plan to allow entrepreneurs into the party, independence for Tibet and whether China deserved to host the Olympics. Every Friday night, users gathered in an online chat room to continue the discussions in real time.
But less than three months after the Democracy and Freedom forum opened, authorities suddenly shut down the Web site hosting it. Neither police nor the site's managers contacted Wu. He simply clicked on his forum's address one day and saw a message on a white screen indicating the page was unavailable.
Wu and his colleagues set up the forum again on another free discussion site, and it flourished undisturbed for six months. Then, one day, as a group of users planned to meet in person, agents of the Ministry of State Security visited one of Wu's two partners. They pressured him to stop participating in the forum and threatened to withhold his doctoral degree, Wu said. After the student's wife also urged him to stop, he agreed to quit.
"We all could understand his decision," said Wu, whose own wife has urged him to give up the Web site. "People have to make their own choices."
Over the next six months, the authorities shut down Wu's forum 12 times. On a few occasions, the entire Web site hosting it would disappear. Other times, only his forum was closed, replaced by a message that said, "This forum has already been deleted."
Wu said he was not afraid back then because the government had not yet arrested many people for Internet activities and because he believed he was doing nothing illegal. "I mainly felt angry," he recalled. "We had freedom of speech on the Internet, but now the authorities wouldn't even let us have that space."
Still, Wu began taking precautions. When posting his own essays, he used a software program that allowed him to sign on to the Internet through a proxy server, making it difficult if not impossible for the authorities to track him down.
Despite the shutdowns, his forum continued to attract new users. Each time it closed and opened, Wu sent out a mass of e-mails with its new location, and flooded the Internet with similar notices.
(cont.)
