To continue along its economic transformation path, China needs free access to information, which means abandoning some of the authoritarian state's zeal to control of the Internet. Yet, the regime also wants to know what its people are up to in the political sphere.
The result has been a conciliation: a move from a culture of broad control to one of sophisticated surveillance. The Great Wall of China, which China's security agencies prefer to call "the golden shield," has evolved into an Orwellian tool that no state has ever before had at its disposal.
"Conventional wisdom had it that the Internet was an unstoppable force for liberalization, with nondemocratic states powerless to control this sprawling, seamless network of networks," stated Ronald Deibert, in his latest article in the Far Eastern Economic Review.
But in an interview, the University of Toronto professor said that Chinese cyberspace is controlled by a complex system of gateways and filters, representing "choke points" that enable the state to spy or censor, pretty much at will.
"China is still the world's most notorious and sophisticated censoring regime," he writes. "Its filtering system comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control ... the system involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel, and a dense web of ever-thickening legal restrictions."
With more than 100 million users, China's security forces can't possibly catch it all; nor do they always want to. But the false impression of easy surfing can make one forget that the Great Firewall can monitor which computer is accessing what site, allowing authorities to trace a user's location, their browsing patterns on the Internet, read e-mail and often record identities. (Anyone at an Internet cafe in China must show identification before signing on and households must register, too, when they sign up for Internet accounts.) Those rules, along with cutting edge software, make the Great Firewall a modern technological wonder that would make Big Brother proud.
"The technology allows Chinese authorities to block web pages they don't want people to see; hijack web sessions if certain taboo keywords like `democracy' and `freedom' are searched; and cancel links that would take viewers to forbidden sites, including pornography, international news sites, the search engine Google, many blogs, and sites related to Tibet and the banned religious movement Falun Gong," notes Esther Pan, a researcher with the Council of Foreign Relations, in a recent paper.
"In addition, automatic censoring software deletes undesirable words or messages from chat rooms and bulletin boards -- or freezes the computer until viewers delete the phrases themselves," she concludes. "The police department has dedicated an entire department, estimated at some 30,000 to 50,000 people, to censoring cyberspace.
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