SELF EXPRESSION IN CHINA: A DOMESTIC DILEMMA WITH GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS

BY CRISTINA GARAFOLA On January 12th, 2010, Google announced via its blog that it had detected a cyber attack nearly a month earlier on its company infrastructure and a number of other large corporations. According to the blog post, the attack, known as Operation Aurora, had been based in China and was targeted to gain access to Gmail accounts opened by Chinese human rights activists (Drummond, 2010a). By March 22nd, Google began redirecting mainland users to its uncensored Hong Kong website, effectively shuttering its direct search engine operations in China (Drummond, 2010b).

China’s development and liberalization have led to average annual GDP growth of over nine percent and have pulled hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty (International Monetary Fund, 2009; Bhagwati, 2005, p. 46). Institutional transformation has been accompanied by societal transformation; today, Chinese citizens have more choices and freedoms than at any point since the 1978 reforms. China’s growing interconnectedness with the world economy has opened up the Chinese economy, and the average Chinese person, to literally a world of different perspectives.

But as the one-party government seeks to control the rate of reform and minimize challenges to its rule, technological advances, especially those that encourage expression and discussion, have become a double-edged sword. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a country with over 384 million Internet users, 86 million of whom began regularly using the Internet in 2009 alone (Chinese Internet Network Information Center, 2010, table 1). As texters, bloggers, and Twitterers have multiplied, the Chinese government has become increasingly committed to maintaining control over the content which citizens post and exchange. Modern day censorship in China has developed into a complex operation, including restrictive software, the hiring of paid censors, governmental vigilance, and automatic blocking of phrases deemed politically sensitive. The Chinese Communist Party’s clampdown on the freedoms of average citizens has implications for both foreign companies and governments: companies must alter business practices to restrict content in order to stay in China, while countries, including the United States, are forced to try to balance commitments to the human rights of all peoples with the strategic importance of maintaining a good relationship with China. Trade is too much a pillar of the U.S.-China relationship for relations to be derailed by disagreements over censorship, but the Chinese government’s attempts to repress and control citizen expression at every turn still raise tensions between the two countries. Ultimately, by not only undermining Western businesses’ faith in the Chinese market, but also constraining creative thought at a time in which the country is focused on innovation and growth, the Chinese government’s clumsy handling of censorship and freedom of expression will negatively impact both its strategic relationships abroad and its ability to juggle domestic political issues.

Background

Many states employ some form of censorship to monitor and control electronic freedom of expression, but the limitations and controls faced by the average Chinese citizen are some of the most consistent and far-reaching in the world (OpenNet Initiative, 2009, p. 1; MacKinnon, 2006). Some political scientists initially expressed optimism about China’s inability to control the spread of politically sensitive information on the Internet (Lacharite, 2002, p. 333); an editorial in The New York Times proclaimed that “by searching for new measures to clamp down on its increasingly high-tech citizens, the Communist Party has taken on a battle it is bound to lose” (as cited in Tkacik, 2004). However, confidence in the overwhelming power of the Internet as a tool of democratization appears to be misplaced; Beijing has actually exploited new technological advances to detect, contain and eliminate content (Segal, 2010, p. 1-2).

In its annual report in 2009, the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, a joint commission created by Congress in 2000, criticized Beijing for removing political and religious content, strengthening monitoring capacity, launching the Green Dam censorship software initiative, and forcing commenters to include personal information before they post (p. 54-67). The report also noted the government’s disregard of Chinese law in its efforts to suppress the publication and spread of Charter 08, a manifesto advocating political reform and protection of human rights (p. 48-49). In a special report on information control and self-censorship, the CECC identified three ways in which the government controls expression on the Internet: heavily restricting media publishing licenses (limiting the publishing scope of critical voices), intentionally leaving the legal definition of free expression vague (resulting in self-censorship because citizens are afraid of possible ramifications) and stratifying speech rights (restricting “freer speech” to carefully selected elites) (2003, p. 2-12). The P.R.C.’s mixed tactics of passively creating hazardous conditions for citizens to speak out while aggressively combating unwanted speech squelches Chinese citizens’ opportunities for free expression.

Still, in a 2002 RAND study, Chase and Mulvenon noted that the Chinese government faces a difficult balancing act; too little censorship would undermine its control, but too much stifles trade (p. 45-46). More than nationalism (as Downs and Saunders theorized in 1998) or ideology, modernization, including continuing economic prosperity and the beginnings of an accountable legal system (Potter, 1994), forms the basis of the government’s legitimacy. With regards to the development of this legal system, Potter (1994) notes the Chinese government has opted to “ride a tiger that is difficult to dismount” (p. 325), a conclusion easily extending to economic policy. As the CCP focuses more and more on maintaining economic growth-based legitimacy, policies that restrict citizens’ ability to use the Internet also affect trade and may undermine the government’s credibility in the long term. Segal (2010) is skeptical that the Chinese Internet will open up, arguing that China’s model presents an alternative for authoritarian governments to emulate (p. 1-2). Can China successfully ride the tigers of economic prosperity and Internet control, or has freedom of expression become a major policy issue on the current and future global stage?

Over the past few years, articles from publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have framed China’s rapid growth in a way that subtly hints at a rising China facing challenges similar to those encountered by America a little over a century ago. Explosive increases in economic production and immense prosperity, coupled with a vast and growing socio-economic divide, have so drastically transformed Chinese society that Chinese often describe society’s transformation since 1978 as “turning the earth and sky upside down”; the Industrial Revolution provided similar if less extreme growth in the United States. Today, the Chinese government struggles to provide a social safety net for the sick and elderly, has yet to find a clear solution to its migrant worker problem, and at times faces high-running tensions between unhappy workers and companies—or even against the regime itself. Likewise, America also encountered these issues on a large scale in the decades preceding World War I. Whether it is tales of freewheeling entrepreneur-billionaires remaking the country on their own terms or the wild excesses enjoyed by the elite (Pan, 2008, chap. 6; Wong E., 2010a, p. A4), the boom and bust cycles of the Industrial Revolution are apparently our American counterpart to modernizing China. Landler (2010) even, if out of context, compares Google’s involvement in China to the United Fruit Company’s role as a player in the politics of Central America, arguing that Google’s product leads it to have a stake in foreign policy (p. WK4). Not surprisingly, these kinds of comparisons paint an optimistic, or at least familiar, picture for Americans contemplating China’s emergence as a world power.

Where the Second America thesis of parallel rising powers struggling to “better” themselves fails is in the details: a country in which human rights are perceived as a cornerstone of political thought versus a government which places a premium on remaining in power; an established, stable superpower versus an up-and-coming and chaotic one; and a country which values freedom of expression versus a country whose people face uncertain rules but clear punishments for speaking their minds. The attack on Google brought this difference to the forefront of short-term bilateral relations and media attention (Foster, 2010).

Western news media have published the entire gamut of responses to the attack on Google and its relationship to recent tensions in the bilateral relationship. Foster (2010) cited a Chinese academic who stated that Google’s pull out would be devastating to both science and technology and international research collaboration in China. The Economist (2010b) opined that recent events indicate Beijing’s insecurity and struggles to cope with change. Pomfret (2010a) and Samuelson (2010) posited that Operation Aurora, among other bilateral tensions with the United States, had uncloaked Beijing’s “China first” policy. In a probably uncoordinated reaction to Beijing’s fuming over the Taiwan arms sale, February 4th articles in both the Washington Post and the Economist declared that China’s mood lately signifies confidence in recent economic prosperity and intolerance of challenges to its sovereignty. Mufson and Pomfret (2010) believed that the media frenzy surrounding Operation Aurora confirmed Americans’ sense of the inevitable rise of China and decline of the United States. Interestingly, their article was published just over a month after the Post had carried a story declaring global investors’ growing confidence in U.S. markets and wariness concerning Chinese ones—possibly influenced by heightened attention to a more restrictive business climate in China (Dorning & Dodge, 2010).

For their part, Chinese authorities have mostly downplayed Operation Aurora’s significance. Officially, the government proclaims that news censorship and Internet content restrictions do not exist in China (CECC, 2003, p. 1; Miao, 2010)

The media firestorm notwithstanding, going forward it is the opinions of scholars and policymakers that will count the most. The Congressional-Executive Committee on China recommended extended talks with Chinese officials regarding international rights standards, developing programs for Chinese reporters to visit and train in the U.S., increasing public awareness at home and on the global stage of speech freedoms issues encountered by Chinese citizens, and developing Chinese-language resources to help people access “free” Internet sites (CECC, 2009, p. 9-10). Some of these recommendations are feasible, but the Chinese rarely place discussions of human rights with the United States high on their to-do list. The Senate has held four relevant hearings on the issue, including two with testimony from a Google executive; has passed a resolution condemning the attack on Google (Senate, 2010), and has other resolutions relating to speech freedoms in the pipeline. Similarly, the House has also held hearings (U.S.-China, 2009). As of mid-2010, however, the concerns raised by Congress have yet to manifest in ways that have significantly affected the bilateral relationship between China and the United States.

In the executive branch, Secretary Clinton discussed restrictions on access to a free flow of information in China in her “Internet Freedoms” speech. The State Department has also convened a multi-bureau NetFreedom Task Force to coordinate U.S. foreign policy on promotion of Internet freedoms (Internet, 2010). However, when asked specifically about U.S. policy toward the attack on Google and general struggles for freedom of speech in China, officials’ responses are consistent in their restraint. Assistant Secretary Posner from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor stated in late April that “we take the view that this is between a private company and the government of another country” (Garafola, 2010a). Given the need for China’s cooperation on possible sanctions on Iran and the upcoming strategic and economic dialogue in late May, State appears to be choosing the timeframe of discussion carefully.

In general, academics writing on the effects of Operation Aurora and Internet restrictions have had far less compunction about speaking their minds. Cohen (2010) argued that the newfound “arrogance” on the part of Chinese officials will continue as long as China perceives a decline in American democracy’s capability for providing economic stability and growth. The director and senior fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS, James Andrew Lewis, concurred, adding that China’s response to Operation Aurora was based on the “perception of European and Russian senility and American incompetence (2010).” Adam Segal from the Council on Foreign Relations cautioned that Operation Aurora is the beginning of the “Chinese Internet Century” in which China’s authoritarian and restricted model becomes increasingly attractive for adoption by other states (2010, p. 1-2). Bizarrely, in a moment of frustration after months of stymied progress on health care reform, New York Times op-ed contributor Thomas Friedman (2009) even expressed admiration for the effectiveness of China’s one party state, envying its ability to make headway on key initiatives (pp. A29).

Methodological Approach

This paper seeks to examine the effect of censorship of Chinese netizens on Chinese domestic politics and relations with the United States. I plan to address the topic by exploring types of censorship regularly encountered by Chinese citizens and the impact of these limitations on Chinese society. I will draw from State Department officials’ released statements, statements from Chinese government and relevant media sources (as the media often serves as a mouthpiece for the government), and general commentary by the media and members of academia. After presenting a cohesive argument based on the above topic, I will attempt to prove my thesis statement, while also providing some policy recommendations for the future.

I will first discuss the types of censorship regularly encountered by Chinese citizens, including (but not limited to) the restrictions placed upon blogging, texting, social media networks, the ability to share information with others, and the posting of controversial stories by online newspapers. I will also detail methods the government takes to combat “undesirable speech,” such as employing human censors. Some cases will be analyzed in more depth, including the development and spread of censorship software, interrogation of bloggers, online newspapers’ leaks of party-critical articles, the “Mud Grass Horse” viral video incident, recently intensifying persecution of blogger-activists, and Operation Aurora, including Google’s history in the Chinese market.

The final section will outline potential problems faced by the government because of speech restrictions and recommendations for current U.S. policy regarding dialogue with China on these issues.

Censorship Tools and Processes in the P.R.C.

Probably perfected during the Cultural Revolution, censorship of speech, writing and other forms of communication has been present for much of China’s modern history. The liberalization reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s forced the government to begin confronting more complex forms of expression; the OpenNet Initiative (2009) noted that in China, the Internet “has been targeted for monitoring since before it was even commercially available” in 1995 (p. 7). Restrictions on speech are loosely defined at best but generally include threats to national security, opposing officially approved political theory, supporting or promoting illegal civil organizations, and organizing events that would “disturb social order” (p. 7). The most controversial incidents involving digital expression have involved blogging, activist use of the Internet, memes, social media, and conflicts between Western companies and the government.

I. Structural Controls: Monitoring and ensuring the removal of unwanted content in the country with the world’s largest number of Internet users is no small undertaking. Accordingly, via an amalgamation of technological, bureaucratic, and other methods, China’s modern censorship system takes a multi-pronged approach to control. All Internet traffic from outside China passes through three computer centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou before it reaches Chinese citizens, thus providing a means by which the government can block foreign websites outright or censor information more subtly through keyword blacklists (Wines, LaFraniere, & Ansfield, 2010).

Information exchange within China is the bigger challenge, however. In May 2009, the government began pushing for the pre-installation of the “Green Dam Youth Escort” filtering software on all personal computers sold in China. After foreign computer companies united in protest, the government dropped the requirement, although it still plans to install the censorship software on computers in schools and other public places (Back, 2009, p. A7). To ensure that news media and high traffic websites follow the CCP’s lead, government officials schedule weekly meetings with China’s most prominent websites, including private companies, to inform sites on which stories should receive more attention, which need specific guidance, and which are off the table (Pan, 2006a). The Chinese government also utilizes its most abundant resource, people power, to remove and combat undesirable speech. In addition to tasking police authorities and other officials with mentoring online content, the government hires “fifty cents,” paid human censors so-named for the reported fee they earn on each post. These monitors can be responsible both for removing content and guiding conversation to support the government’s position; there are an estimated 40,000 fifty cents currently employed to tinker with public opinion (Meredith, 2010). When Beijing feels especially threatened, it can simply power down restive provinces; Xinjiang’s telecommunications network was shut down for approximately six months in wake of the unrest in Urumqi (Meredith, 2010). For the CCP, structural controls are the first line of defense against sensitive content.

II. Battling over Blogs: Much like in the West, as Chinese Internet users have increased, blog ownership and readership has exploded, drawing the Chinese government’s attention to controlling expression on blogs or boke (博客). A state-run nonprofit group called the China Internet Network Information Center estimated that as of June 2009, “there were 182 million personal blogs and ‘personal spaces’ in China… of which a third were being updated at least once every six months” (as cited in Cannon & Yang, 2010). Although much of Internet use in China is entertainment-based, a small but increasingly visible percentage of blogs focus on political issues and thus encounter government efforts to contain and remove content. To minimize the amount of information requiring governmental observation, the CCP puts pressure on blog hosting companies to delete politically sensitive material, and many Chinese blog companies self-censor to avoid confrontation with authorities in the first place (Pan, 2006b).

Nevertheless, some bloggers still manage to work around these limitations, and for many of them, direct confrontation with government authorities has become increasingly likely. These ordeals have become known as “drinking tea” sessions. During the sessions, police and other officials interrogate bloggers about their activities and attempt to instruct them on the official party view of the sensitive content. Bloggers forced to “have a cup of tea” include public signers of Charter 08 (such as yxmermxy and Persian Xiaozhao ), but even university students reposting articles by controversial activists have been removed from the classroom for visits by authorities (Xiao Q., 2010a). As some bloggers have become more famous, censoring their posts has been complicated by authorities’ aversion to inciting widespread public backlash. Shanghai native Han Han (韩寒) is a 27 year old racecar driver and author with over 363 million hits on his blog, making it the most popular personal blog in China and possibly in the world (Hille, 2010). After being named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2010, Han Han posted a response on his blog, dismissing his power to effect change:

I am just a person with a pen…. The so-called influence is illusory. In China, those who have influence are those who have power. Those who can make rain from clouds, those who can decide if you live or die, or keep you somewhere in between life and death…. I just wish those people put their influence to good use. (Xiao Q., 2010b)

As of late April 2010, the post had received over 1.1 million page views and 25,000 comments. Although some Chinese newspaper articles have responded to the announcement by discrediting Han Han’s influence (Xiao S., 2010), it does not appear that officials have moved publically to remove the related blog post, possibly because Han Han has never offered a specific challenge—or promoted an alternative—to CCP rule (Hille, 2010). Blogs increasingly come under fire from government censorship, but by openly discussing their interactions with authorities and the controversy surrounding censorship in general, bloggers encourage fellow netizens to continue discussing issues and posting as they wish.

III. Containing the Spread of Internet Memes: Given the growing popularity of blogging and social networking sites in China, the speed at which information is shared among Chinese Internet users has also increased rapidly. One result of this phenomenon all over the globe is the rise of Internet memes, stories or jokes spread organically from person to person that gain a huge following in a relatively short amount of time. The most famous meme coming out of China is the “grass mud horse.” Sounding similar to a vulgar curse word but written with different Chinese characters, the grass mud horse was originally one of ten “mythical creature” profanities that surfaced in January 2009. The alpaca-like animal was soon featured in YouTube videos and blogs across the country (Chinese, 2009), battling against invading river crabs (slang for “harmony,” or censorship). By mid-February, the Chinese government had launched a new initiative to crack down on pornography and other undesirable speech (Wines, 2009, p. A1). Cui Weiping, a social critic and Beijing Film Academy professor, commented:

[The] underlining [sic] tone [of “grass mud horse”] is: I know you do not allow me to say certain things…. Of course I think it [is] inappropriate to utter these obscene words…. Even if you force me to say those words, I won’t comply…. And I am not vulgar. I am singing a cute children’s song—I AM A GRASS MUD HORSE! Even though it is heard by the entire world, you can’t say I’ve broken the law. (As cited in Xiao Q., 2009.)

In China, politically sensitive Internet memes like the grass mud horse not only mock the government, they actively poke holes in its ability to monitor and remove content. The grass mud horse snuck past censors precisely because of its innocuousness; none of the Chinese characters in the phrase were part of any previously censored phrases, and the horses’ triumphant defeat of the censorship “river crabs” became immortalized in rap songs and on T-shirts even while the government was trying to remove the videos from blogs and websites.

Similar to some memes in disguising a blogger’s true meaning, blog speech often includes methods for avoiding censorship of words and phrases. For example, bloggers may use different characters with the same pronunciation to replace a sensitive term: in the grass mud horse song, harmony or hexie (和谐) becomes river crab, also pronounced hexie (河蟹), although the tones are different. Another method of confounding censors is using the Roman alphabet; dang (党) or party (as in the Chinese Communist Party) can be represented with just a D and slipped in a sentence. For robotic computer censors or even human ones, bloggers’ fluid adoption of new memes and terms is a barrier to monitoring content. The blogging community may get the inside jokes, but censors who don’t speak their language are constantly forced to play catch up.

IV. Pushing Back against Online Newspapers: By dramatically shortening the time between composition and dissemination to the public, the advent of news websites challenges the ability of the government to quickly regulate online content published by those who are technically its subordinates, the newspapers. In 2003, the Southern Metropolis Daily, a gutsy and award-winning paper out of Guangzhou province, broke a story on shourong stations, or custody and repatriation centers, in which a graphic designer named Sun Zhigang was beaten to death while being held under questionable legality for forgetting to carry his national identity card. The paper’s editor, Cheng Yizhong, relied on popular Chinese web portals like Sina and Sohu to spread the story, and the Daily’s article on Sun Zhigang’s death spread like wildfire from the sites to blogs and forums across the country. Within two months of the article’s publication, the shourong system was dissolved by Premier Wen Jiabao and his cabinet (Pan, 2008, p. 252-256).

In 2006, the China Youth Daily editor-in-chief proposed a plan to tie reporters’ salaries to party officials’ approval or disapproval of their stories. After learning about the plan, a senior editor named Li Datong posted a letter, highly critical of both the proposal and the propaganda system, to the Daily’s computer system. The memo leaked to the outside world within minutes, and despite censors’ best efforts, spread all over the country. The CCP eventually abandoned the editor-in-chief’s plan (Pan, 2006a).

Despite these perceived successes, neither Daily got off scot-free. The editor of Southern Metropolis Daily, Cheng Yizhong, was not permitted to return to work for any newspaper run by the Southern Newspaper Group (Pan, 2008, p. 260), and the paper’s general manager Yu Huafeng, who was beaten in a secret detention facility, later served over four years in prison (Cody, 2008). Likewise, Li Datong and a top investigative reporter were forced off their original posts into research positions at the China Youth Daily (Yardley, 2006). Newspapers’ use of the Internet has led to more openness in Chinese society, but this “liberalization” is tempered by the government’s continued commitment to, and success in, plugging the holes created by reporters. Another obstacle for reporters, whether posting online or not, is determining the right moment to act—when censors and mid-level officials will hesitate to act in fear of going against the will of the highest level of officials. Despite these narrow windows of opportunity and the necessity of moving quickly before censors eradicate a scoop, Chinese reporters have still managed to achieve some remarkable gains by using the Internet to their advantage.

V. Increasing Control of Texting: For Americans, China’s mobile-phone statistics are as incomprehensible as its Internet use figures; over 750 million Chinese, more than double the entire U.S. population, are mobile phone users. Many Chinese mobile phones are also equipped to access the Internet (Beach, 2010). As texting is generally cheaper than making a phone call, the popularity of sending text messages has soared in China. Naturally, increased government supervision of text messages has followed not far behind. As recently as July 2008, NPR reported that “text messaging is beyond the reach of China’s infamous government censors” and dissidents were using texting to organize protests (Sydell, 2008). However, by October 2009, officials’ increasing interest in imposing controls on cell phones had become readily apparent. For China’s equivalent of the Fourth of July, the P.R.C.’s 60th anniversary celebration known as National Day, the state-controlled mobile service provider China Mobile altered its customers’ ring-back songs to “Guojia,” or “Country.” When phone users called the affected cell phones, lyrics such as “a country stands up in the world,” “only when we have a strong country can we have a prosperous family,” and “country is glorious perseverance” played while the caller waited for someone to pick up (LaFraniere, 2009). Those who wanted to remove the patriotic song had to search for the directions themselves on China Mobile’s website.

In January 2010, Western media sources reported that the Chinese government was beginning to crack down on texting, although the standards by which a text could be determined “illegal or unhealthy” were unclear (Meredith, 2010). Eventually, details emerged about the scheme; urban centers like Beijing and Shanghai were testing out a text-filtering system that would punish texters from sending profane or smutty messages by blocking the phone’s text function. While attempting to discourage such “yellow” texts (the Chinese slang for sexually-based media), the government has been simultaneously pursuing a “red” text campaign of patriotic messages that encourage government-approved thought. Bo Xilai, a rising star in Chinese elite politics, sent out a message with quotes from Chairman Mao last April; up to 16 million phones received his text (Texting, 2010c).

VI. Employing Two Different Approaches to Social Media Networks: Despite Twitter’s growing popularity all over the globe and Facebook’s recent surpassing of Google as the most visited site each week in America (Childs, 2010), both social networking sites have been blocked in China since mid-2009. The continued blocking of Twitter, in particular, has been seen as a proactive step by the government to prevent citizens from quickly spreading information during tense political situations, exemplified by Iranians’ use of Twitter during the protests of the contested 2009 presidential election. YouTube, Flickr, and blog hosting sites like Blogger and Word Press are also inaccessible from mainland China.

While many Western social media networks are unusable in China, their Chinese counterparts have only gained in popularity. Borrowing Facebook’s color scheme and basic format, its Chinese equivalent, Renren Network (“Network of Everyone”), ranks 88th in traffic globally and 18th in China (Renren.com, 2010). Chinese social media networks have benefited enormously from their Western counterparts’ inability to function on the mainland, domestic protectionism being a fringe benefit of censorship in this case. Like other Chinese websites, social media networks proactively remove sensitive political, religious, and other content to avoid tensions with the government.

Chinese Censorship on the Global Stage: Operation Aurora and Google’s Exit from the P.R.C.

Because citizens of Western countries and Western companies are generally not affected by Chinese censorship, global awareness regarding the pervasiveness of censorship in China has spread relatively slowly. Operation Aurora accelerated Western interest in the ramifications of Chinese censorship because of Google’s international presence. The search engine giant, like many other influential companies, has an established history in the P.R.C. Google began developing its mainland search engine in 2005 and the site launched the next year (Garafola, 2010b). At the time, critics derided Google’s agreement to censor search engine results on sensitive topics as an opportunistic ploy for increased market share in Asia and a failure to live up to its informal slogan, “Don’t be evil” (Thompson, 2006, p. 1).
Then, on January 12th, Google announced that it and other companies—34 in total, including large American corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Symantech—had been targeted by a hacking attack in late 2009. On its blog, Google declared that:
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. (Drummond, 2010a)

Google’s announcement unleashed a large-scale reaction on both sides of the Pacific. In a speech given at the Newseum on January 21st, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directly addressed increased Internet censorship in China and other nations while outlining the United States government’s position on Internet freedom:

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it…. Our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. (p. 2)

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, responding to allegations of government restrictions on online freedoms, responded that “the Internet is open in China, where the government always encourages its development and has created a favorable environment for its healthy development” (Miao, 2010). Google quickly and publically made efforts to tighten security on user accounts, actions which Beijing manipulated for its own benefit. Joel Harding of the Association of Old Crows, a professional organization dedicated to the study of electronic warfare and related security issues, noted that collaborative exercises between Google and the NSA on February 3rd were quickly labeled by the Chinese government as proof that Google and the United States government “were in bed together” (Garafola, 2010b). An article from China Daily, widely considered to be the English-language mouthpiece for the Chinese government, lashed out at the U.S. response to the attack:

The essence of the U.S. Internet strategy is to exploit its advantages in Internet funds, technology and marketing, and export its politics, commerce and culture to other nations for political, commercial and cultural interests of the world’s only superpower. This is not merely sales, but coerced trade under the disguise of protecting ‘universal values.’ (Yang, ed., 2010)

A little after two months after Operation Aurora was revealed, Google closed its mainland Google.cn search engine and began redirecting search traffic to its uncensored Hong Kong website, Google.hk (Drummond, 2010b). As of late April, little progress had been made on the investigation at the two schools believed to be the source of the attacks; Harding noted that officials’ response to requests for further details about the hackings have been met with complete ambiguity: “If we have a problem, it will be investigated” (2010b).

Although many technology corporations have an established presence in countries with restricted speech rights and other limitations on individual freedoms, the massive media attention surrounding Operation Aurora has highlighted a need for re-evaluating corporate policies. Executive Director of Freedom House, Jennifer Windsor, characterized the situation as the dawning of the view that corporate responsibility practices encompass not only workers’ rights and environmental concerns, but also companies’ roles as ”the lynchpins of freedom of expression” (Garafola, 2010a). For its part, Google has established two sites to increase transparency regarding its operations: one specifically monitors accessibility of Google products and service in the P.R.C., while the other calculates requests for information or data removal by countries (Mainland, 2010a; Government, 2010b). Because China considers publication of such information on the latter site to fall under a breach of its state secrets law, however, the mainland’s data are represented only by a question mark on the world map—a literal indication that the information is publically unknown.

Censorship, Economic Growth, and Legitimacy

If Chinese censorship were purely a domestic human rights issue, a position the Chinese government would probably prefer outsiders to adopt, Western governments would likely relegate the problem to a list of talking points and businesses would accept the situation as the cost of doing business in China. However, restrictions on freedom of expression are not only the frontline on transformation of Chinese society and thus an indicator of the long-term direction of the country’s reforms; censorship also has direct implications for the development of China’s economy and foreign businesses with a presence there. For the outside world, the benefits of developing a stance and policy to discourage China from tamping down on citizen speech are clear. What would unnerve the government even more is the realization that speech controls stifle creativity and innovation of native companies, thus undermining China’s economic development and weakening the CCP’s legitimacy by tilting it even more toward fulfilling citizens’ ever-rising expectations of prosperity.

The Case for Increased Foreign Diplomacy: At a student town hall hosted by the State Department on the role of NGOs in human rights advocacy, Tom Malinowski, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch, commented that Operation Aurora had illuminated one of the most crucial issues of the modern era, particularly for U.S.-China relations: the future of Internet systems (Garafola, 2010a). A one-Internet system acts as a common space to bring countries together, but a two-system space with one open and one closed system has both economic and security consequences: “In moments of tension [between the United States and China]… American citizens will have access to all sides of the story…. Chinese citizens, however, will not—they will face asymmetry of information” (Garafola, 2010a).

From a security aspect, the dangers of allowing attacks like Operation Aurora to continue are obvious. In an October 2009 report entitled “Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation,” the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission determined that:

China is likely using its maturing computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the US Government and industry by conducting a long term, sophisticated, computer network exploitation campaign. The problem is characterized by disciplined, standardized operations, sophisticated techniques, access to high-end software development resources, a deep knowledge of the targeted networks, and an ability to sustain activities inside targeted networks, sometimes over a period of months. (7)

Although in the case of the attack against Google, no conclusive evidence of government involvement has yet come to light, Derek Scissors, an Asia Economic Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, pointed out that hacking attempts coming out of China are rarely beyond the scope of government awareness. Because hackers pose potential threats to the regime, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and other agencies track down hacking groups as they become more successful and may even co-opt them in some cases (Garafola, 2010b). The implication is that “the government either knows the entity responsible for the attacks, or it actually conducted the attacks itself” (Garafola, 2010b). Even if a hacking group of this caliber somehow managed to evade authorities, as the Chinese government controls mainland Internet service providers (ISPs), which assign users specific, easily-trackable codes, Harding concluded that the government at least has some culpability because it can monitor where, and to whom, hacked information is sent (Garafola, 2010b). The Chinese government’s growing history of supporting, or at least covering for online intelligence gathering and “hactivism,” leaves other countries increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

China’s emphasis on acquiring rather than developing the materials it needs to grow also has economic consequences for itself and others. For foreign businesses, potential markets of up to 1.3 billion new customers drew them to the P.R.C., but concerns regarding theft of intellectual property, or IP, have led many to re-evaluate their presence on the mainland. Companies relying on patents and intellectual property rights as a key component of their business models have found the government unsympathetic to their situation because “the prevailing modus operandi among officials is to treat the protection of intellectual property as impediments to [the government’s] control” (CECC, 2009, p. 226). In a speech Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs Robert Hormats gave at the U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum in December 2009, for U.S. businesses alone, recording, music, and business software industries have estimated that piracy of their products in China cost them approximately $3.5 billion in 2008 (p. 4).

Government officials such as Wen Jiabao have acknowledged that despite strong growth, “the Chinese economy… was unbalanced, uncoordinated, unstable and unsustainable;” given this, the government needed to pursue “intellectual and technological innovation, with the understanding that innovation… has the power to correct imbalances by adding high value service sector jobs that employ Chinese talent” (as cited in Remarks, 2009, p. 3). Nevertheless, China’s unorthodox approach to acquiring IP, a direct result of the government’s unwillingness to tighten restrictions on theft for strategic reasons, is also seen by Western authorities as a means of domestic protectionism. The government’s implementation of “indigenous innovation” policies focuses on controlling development of technologies and their use while simultaneously promoting home-grown technology companies, including Internet services companies. According to Edward Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, these policies require mainland government agencies to “purchase only products for which intellectual property was developed and owned in China. Both Indigenous Innovation [sic] and Internet censorship are policies that set the price of access to the Chinese market at an unacceptable level of submissiveness” because companies must bend so much to accommodate the authorities (2010, p. 7).

At the very least, foreign companies enter protected markets with immediate handicaps. In the second part of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled “Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law” held in March 2010, Daniel Weitzner, an official from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, commented that a country’s lack of clearly defined laws regarding technology companies immediately constrains businesses because they must figure out rules regarding speech by themselves (Global, 2010). These obstacles force companies to allocate time and financial resources to determine how to work with control-prioritizing governments. The problem is compounded when laws are in flux or so vague as to permit the government to broadly interfere in business. The June 2009 release of a proposed revision to the P.R.C.’s State Secrets Law was criticized both for failing to clarify the vague definition of “state secrets” and also for imposing “an affirmative obligation on Internet and telecommunications companies to report the discovery of a disclosure of state secrets and to remove such information upon official request” (CECC, 2009, p.66). Despite these objects, the revised law passed this summer.

But constraining foreign businesses in order to encourage “indigenous innovation” and avoid overseas innovation from gaining too strong a foothold on Chinese markets is paradoxical for a number of reasons. Chinese innovation has an extraordinarily low chance of developing to compete with foreign innovation precisely because of the chokeholds placed on freedom of expression within China. The free exchange of ideas and ability to test new products and services, even at the risk of failure, is the engine driving American innovation in places like Silicon Valley (Garafola, 2010c). Thus, domestic protectionism cannot succeed over the long term because Chinese technology and IP-dependant companies have no means of overcoming the basic structural obstacles in their path. Beijing’s tamping down on foreign businesses also alienates these companies at the precise moment in which they could be developing partnerships with Chinese companies. By sharing techniques and best practices, the missing pieces of the puzzle home-grown companies could use to truly innovate, foreign businesses are valuable resources for developing countries looking to become more competitive both at home and abroad.

The Chinese government’s actions toward foreign businesses have not yet become intrusive enough to outweigh the obvious commercial benefits of having a presence in China, but they may have given companies pause. Derek Scissors of the Heritage Foundation noted that incidents like Operation Aurora and the recent Rio Tinto case, in which Australian executives were arrested for bribery and espionage, are not unprecedented, but lack of a serious infraction on Google’s part to provoke the attack in the former case, and the government’s persecution of Chinese-born executives in the latter, leave companies wondering the extent to which they will have to cooperate with the regime in order to continue doing business in China (Garafola, 2010b).

Likewise, a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of her position, concurred on May 7th that foreign companies are well entrenched in China but may think twice about adding new research capabilities or investing at the pace they had originally planned. By increasing restrictions on freedom of speech and requiring foreign companies to aid in controlling Chinese citizens’ spread of information, the Chinese government has created a vicious circle with potentially huge economic repercussions for China’s growth. As an economic powerhouse with large amounts of foreign investment, the situation will heavily impact multinational businesses and other nations, as well.

Even more worrisome for Beijing is the effect of continued suppression of speech rights on the CCP’s legitimacy. The government has chosen to frame the argument for tightening restrictions as an issue of morality and new measures as methods of protecting children from dangerous pornographic content (Garafola, 2010c), logic that may satisfy many citizens but is also dismissed by millions of dissidents, bloggers, and skeptics. By avoiding discussion of political rights and emphasizing “social stability” over social progress (CECC 2009 3), however, the Chinese government has dug itself further into a hole. The current, fourth generation of political leadership (with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao at the helm) has called for the need for “social stability” to accommodate China’s rapid economic development, but in the long run, tying citizens’ satisfaction in the government’s legitimacy to ever-rising expectations of financial prosperity will result in the CCP’s downfall if it does not find a way to change tack.

In an April 2010 edition of NewsChina, commentator Qiu Feng wrote that “in the past few years, officials, scholars and ordinary Chinese alike have conceptualized modernization as being only material affluense (sic) and economic prosperity…. The consensus seems to be that all our social and political problems will be solved once we achieve economic success” (p. 63). Qiu Feng then calls for China to “choose the right path” in its modernization. Writing in a weekly magazine published by the state-owned China News Service, Qiu included examples of socio-economic disparity to prove his point, but the implications for regime legitimacy are also obvious. China’s economic boom is unsustainable for an infinite amount of time; as China becomes more developed, the rate of growth will slacken and the government will need some other basis upon which to rest its legitimacy if it wants to maintain power. By tightening the screws on freedom of expression today, the government rides a tiger that will be very hard to dismount in the future.

The Role of the United States: In terms of U.S. policy toward preserving and protecting freedom of speech for all people, Operation Aurora appears to have been, at some level, a wake-up call that drew attention to new media and the Internet as the next frontier. Foggy Bottom reanimated the Global Internet Freedom Task Force in late 2009 to coordinate Internet policy (NetFreedom, 2010b), and it also recently offered the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a group primarily run by Falun Gong practitioners, $1.5 million in funding to improve censorship-defeating Internet tools (Pomfret, 2010b). Recent events in China have also potentially tilted in America’s favor; the Chinese government just restored Internet access to Xinjiang province, a sign of P.R.C. confidence in its control of the western province but also an improvement in the basic freedoms of tens of millions (Hogg, 2010). There is also the possibility that the recent horrific and deadly attacks on schoolchildren, five separate incidents in which most of the attackers had no acquaintance with their victims (Wong, E. 2010b, p. A1), may lead academic and political elites to begin questioning the importance of pressure-release valves in a fast-changing and restricting society. In bilateral exchanges and other dialogues with China, the United States must find a way to convey the interconnected and strengthening ties between freedoms of speech, economic development, and political legitimacy. China’s government may have chosen to ride the tiger, but the United States and other nations have a stake in—and an obligation to—convincing the P.R.C. to adopt a new vehicle of growth.

Conclusion

Chinese citizens and foreign companies operating on the mainland face strict and pervasive censorship that has negative implications for China’s political and economic development, as well as its relationships with other nations. Without the innovation that accompanies freer exchange of ideas, China’s domestic businesses face potentially insurmountable difficulties to extending growth. At the same time, by staking its political legitimacy on economic success, the Chinese government is vulnerable to crisis if the country does not maintain relatively high rates of economic expansion. China’s IP-related business practices and others have already resulted in increased dialogue with Western nations, but the United States and other countries must work harder to convince China that freedoms of expression, economic development, and political legitimacy are inextricably linked.

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