January, 2010

Strict Control is Never the Answer

Sandy WONG
Honorary Research Fellow of China Ministry, HKCI

Editor’s remark: Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years for "inciting subversion of state power" on 25 December 2009. The accusation was obviously laid against him for writing Charter 08, a manifesto already co-signed by hundreds of Chinese intellectuals for political reform and democratization in the PRC. The manifesto got wider circulation and influence through the internet, resulting in thousands of people signing it inside and outside China. We may say that the worldwide dissemination of the manifesto was one of the reasons why Liu was accused of “inciting subversion”, and the heavy penalty Liu has received reflected how much the PRC government fears the power of the internet.

On 12 January 2010, Google China made a strong statement that “they are no longer willing to continue censoring …results on Google.cn” because of a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” they detected on Google and other companies in China. The attack was aimed at “accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists”. The high profile announcement reflected the severity and systematicality of the cyber attacks and censorship of the PRC.

We can see that the PRC government has made a lot of efforts to prohibit free speech in the world of internet. To fully control the circulation of information on the internet is, of course, not an easy, if not impossible, task. Netizens will however find their own ways of resistance and transgression. Last October, netizens in China issued an online Internet Human Rights Declaration and made 10 October China’s Internet Human Rights Day.

On 8 October 2009, 15 Chinese intellectuals, including writers, scholars and lawyers, jointly issued the online Internet Human Rights Declaration. They laid down ten principles to reaffirm netizens’ rights to conduct interviews and report findings, to make comments and to exchange opinions, their right to online privacy, and so on. In a word, the Declaration reinstated the citizen’s rights to access and disseminate information.

This action is regarded as a grassroots response to the Chinese government’s strict control over the Internet. The Chinese government has a notorious reputation for internet censorship. In terms of law and regulation, most of the websites in China now require the provision of real personal login data; web managers are under pressure to remove sensitive and critical comments within a few minutes.

The information controls has been tightened up considerably in 2009, which was a politically sensitive year for China. Apart from the 60th anniversary of PRC, it is also the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests and the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s exile. Moreover, natural disasters, social unrests and ethnic conflicts occurred one after the other. In the Internet, several major social media, such as Fanfou (a Chinese website similar to twitter) and Douban were suspended temporarily. Major overseas websites, such as Youtube and Twitter, have been blocked temporarily.

The event of issuing the Internet Human Rights Declaration is quite politically symbolic. The initiators chose October 8th, which was two days before the 98th anniversary of Xinhai Revolution, to issue the Declaration. As the initiators declared, “a group of patriots staged an uprising to end the rule of a cruel and racist dynasty” on October 10th, 1911; therefore, they tried to make October 10th China’s Internet Human Rights Day, as “a way of commemorating the patriots’ bravery and their spirit of freedom.” According to the report from the Global Times, Wen Yunchao, one of the initiators, said that they wanted to “send a positive signal to policy-makers that even under the legal protection, strict control is not the answer.” He thought that what they were doing was to reaffirm Internet-related rights within the framework of China’s Constitution.

The Internet is a unique communication medium. Like no other medium before, it allows individuals to express their ideas and opinions directly to a world audience and easily to each other, while allowing access to many more ideas, opinions and information than previous media have allowed. The free flow of information always arouses rulers’ fear and anger. Therefore, they adopt thousands of methods to make the information flow less free.

Blocking, filtering, and labeling techniques can restrict freedom of expression and can limit access to information; however, they can never extinct people’s will and struggle to get information. Through the Internet, citizens from even the most repressive regimes are able to find information about matters concerning their own governments and their human rights records that no newspaper may dare print, while denouncing the conditions under which they live, for the world to hear. This power to give and receive information, so central to any conception of democracy, never can be completely destroyed on the Internet, as nowhere before.

As the initiators declared, they called for the establishment of an Internet Human Rights Day to remind everyone of the need to safeguard freedom of speech on the Internet. They considered this as “the only effective way to make sure all people in Chinese enjoy human rights and happiness.” Whether or not establishing an Internet Human Rights Day is “the only effective way” is hard to tell, the action of issuing the Declaration and calling for supporters is at least a way of fighting for human rights. Even in the most authoritarian country, the Internet provides resources for people to express and defend their rights; the attempt to issue the Declaration on the Internet is a good example of this.