Aug 27, 2002

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Chinese dissidents are doing their best to use the Internet to bring democratic change to their society, but government crackdowns and the nation's rural demographics mean that more freedoms are unlikely to come soon, says a private study.

Released by Rand Corp., the report, "You've Got Dissent," said that while dissidents use the Internet for liberation, the Chinese government uses the same tools to keep an eye on activists.

"There was a lot of very loose talk about how the Internet was going to bring down all the authoritarian regimes," said James Mulvenon, one of the authors of the report released this week. However, he said, "the Chinese government has proven surprisingly nimble over the past five or six years in surpassing the technological challenges the dissidents have presented them."

About 33 million Chinese were online as of January 2002, the authors said, though there is a significant Chinese "digital divide." Most Chinese Internet users are young, well-educated men in eastern cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Only two percent are rural peasants, although peasants make up the bulk of China's population of 1.2 billion.

In comparison, the Commerce Department reported that 143 million Americans, more than half of the population, were online as of last year.

[...]

Some, particularly Chinese expatriates, use unsolicited e-mail to recipients in China. While such e-mail, known as "spam," is a nuisance in the United States, in China an e-mail to hundreds of thousands of recipients gives readers plausible deniability if they are harassed by government officials.

Using the Web has become more difficult thanks to government measures. Chinese Internet surfers used to use "proxy sites" to visit banned Web sites, though Mulvenon said the government -- which has complete control over Internet access in China -- is quick to block off those proxies within hours of their use.

The Chinese government has been cracking down on unlicensed Internet cafes, particularly after a June 2002 fire in a Beijing cafe that killed 24 customers. [...] thousands have been closed over the past year for failing to install surveillance software.

According to the Rand report, at least 25 Chinese have been arrested in the past two years due to their online activities.

Some Chinese non-governmental organizations have hacked Falun Gong Web sites in order to take them offline, the report said.

China has used regulatory measures to get Chinese companies to censor their own customers as well. Internet providers in China are responsible for the activities of their customers, Mulvenon said, so these providers have hired employees, known as "big mamas," who monitor chat rooms and kick out subversives.

Chinese dissidents have started to find new weapons in their guerrilla war. File-trading networks, the same technology that gives American music and movie companies fits, can help dissidents communicate. Since modern networks like Gnutella and Kazaa have no central source, they would be harder to turn off.

[...]

The Rand authors believe time is on the dissidents' side. They say many Chinese look to their Korean and Taiwanese neighbors and want economic prosperity before political freedoms, but the Internet is gradually bringing both.

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