How the Chinese firewall is failing

Controlling the worlds largest Internet user base has become akin to ?nailing jello to the wall?

News of a minister seeking to (unsuccessfully) censor the internet or a senior politician?s son reacting to a netizen?s comment causing a furore are common knowledge in India. Surely things cannot fare better in ?unfreedom?, in China, or so we would like to think. Surely the Communist Party has succeeded in squeezing and muting netizens, what with a purported stint or two at a gulag in Qinghai (China?s Siberia) awaiting them?

On the contrary, despite the Party?s best efforts, things are not like that. Google, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are banned in China, but China?s own Google (Baidu), Twitter (weibo), Facebook (Renren) and Youtube (Youku, 56.com), which the Party cannot stop access to, are more than compensating. This goes to show that state control merely on the print and television media is not going to matter when you are in the world?s largest internet country.

Consider these incidents. When the train crash took place in 2011, it was announced to the world by a tweet by a Beijing University student Yangjuan Quanyang within 4 minutes of the crash; the state had no chance (even if it would have wanted to) to stop the world from knowing this. A Twitter feed by US Embassy in Beijing (username: @Beijingair) sends hourly air quality measurements neatly disputing data put forth by the Party. In 2011, a netizen discovered that a young lady (who had a humble job at the Red Cross) loved to show off her riches (including a Maserati car). Within two hours this young lady?s micro-blog was shared over a thousand times, which unveiled corruption at Beijing?s Red Cross. In the raging scandal of 2013, ?Fang Family?, (fang in Chinese means house, home or room) a netizen triggered off a chain reaction across the country with netizens streaming online to report benami properties owned by local Party officials.

The Party?s attempt to control the internet and netizens as President Clinton once said is increasingly akin to trying to ?nail jello to the wall?. This is precisely the conundrum of the new leadership duo of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Television commentators love to describe President Xi and Premier Li as the ?second most powerful in the world? (after President Barack Obama). This may be true, but realistically speaking, their?s is hardly a lark of a job. If anything, they are at the helm of an altered, fractious, ambitious, polarised and divided social landscape that is increasingly urbane, sophisticated and, most of all, internet savvy?boasting the world?s largest internet userbase of 513 million in 2012?with access to a decentralised information structure that makes Party mouthpieces such as CCTV (India?s Doordarshan) and the Peoples Daily newspaper almost obsolete.

China boasts the worlds largest mobile phone users?800 million. Imagine, half the population has a cellphone. Smartphones cost as little as 800 yuan (R7,000) and the market is brimming with shanzhai (fakes) for even less. Internet users have increased sevenfold from an estimated 59 million in 2002 to 162 million in 2009 to 513 million in 2012. The number of websites has jumped from 371,600 in 2002 to 1.3 million in 2009.

According to the semi-official China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC)?which sinologist Karten Giese says is prone to giving out ?shaky data? that should be taken as ?rough trends??in 2011, 41% of Internet users were older than 30 and the average Chinese internet user spends 19.8 hours per week online. According to a report in January 2012, 63% of Chinese internet users (324 million) play online games.

This mobile phone and Internet user base also displays a marked proclivity for messaging, blogging (personal diaries, which numbered an estimated 47 million in 2007) and micro-blogging (users can tweet using 140-160 Chinese characters on weibo).

First, messaging is old hat?it peaked in the mid 2000s driven by popular television shows such as ?Super-girls? (modeled after ?American Idol?) with the channel egging viewers to SMS them their favourite contestant. As messaging became fashionable a cryptic syntax evolved. Sample this: ?521? ( I love you), ?531? ( I miss you) or ?478? (damn you!).

Second, blogs in China are no less exciting. Niche blogs such as ChinaSMACK, DigiCha and ChinaGeeks discuss issues?nationalism, relations with Japan, corruption and even social trends. Blogger Zola Zhou wrote famously about Chongqing?s ?nail house? in 2004 (Chongqing is a municipality in China, other municipalities are Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin). At Chongqing, a developer wanted to mow a house down and had it surrounded by bulldozers to intimidate the recalcitrant owner. A netizen took this online and caused an uproar.

Blogs of the young and handsome racing car driver Han Han (less well known in India than artist Ai Weiwei) are wildly popular (5 million hits in 2011). Han Han?s blogs are subversive in intent and content but cloaked in syrup. Thus, Han Han crosses no line and yet his ?Three Essays? (in 2011) were ?Talking Revolution?, ?Discussing Democracy? and ?Wanting Freedom?.

Third, according to a CNNIC report, China?s weibo users have increased from 63 million in 2010 to 250 million in 2011, an annual growth of 296%. China?s weibo penetration rate is also large at 48.7% partly because weibo can be easily accessed via mobile devices. The main players in the weibo market are Sina and Tencent. According to Sina data and CNNIC, Sina weibo users are a younger population (between 19-30 years), 67% of whom are college educated. It is telling that a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) report says that over 70% of weibo users regard this as a primary and reliable source of information. Then are video-sharing sites such Youku, with e-gao (e for evil; gao for change) often circulating videos doing something damning?making the Party ?uncool?.

What is the combined import of messaging, blogs, weibo and video-sharing? Netizens are increasingly addressing contentious ?offline? issues pertaining to miscarriage of justice, corruption and nationalism. In fact, as social scientist Fan Yafeng has famously said, citizenship struggles are going ?social?.

Sinologist Guobin Yang says that the Party employs internet filtering technologies that employ specific keywords or addresses, regulates bloggers and internet cafes, employing an estimated 30,000-strong police force to trawl the net. In fact, China boasts of a ?50% army? (wu mao dang) of unofficial pro-Party commentators who are paid 50 cents per (favourable) posting. Cyber cops vary from ?Big Mama? (dama) to student monitors called ?little sisters? (xiaomei) to Internet nannies (wangbaomu).

Famous, too, is the ? great firewall? (GFW, fanhuo qiang). But more and more people are jumping the wall (fan qiang) with the help of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and proxy servers. Fang Binxing (who is regarded as the father of the Great Firewall) is reported to have said in February 2012, ?I have six VPNs on my computer? .

Ironically, as sinologist Gudrun Wacker points out, it is western firms that supply the means of surveillance. Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks (Canada), Dupont and Daniel Data Systems (Israel) displayed their products at the trade fair ?Security China 2000? organised with the cooperation of China?s ministry of public security.

The new leadership can perhaps take comfort by the still low rate of internet penetration, which was 34.3% in 2012. In 2009, China?s internet penetration rate was 16% compared to mature markets such as US (69%), UK (63%) South Korea (67%) and Japan (67%). China?s rural populace is also ?unwired?, speaking of a ?digital divide? between urban and rural China, and de-facto between America and China. As sinologist Karten Giese says, there are ?few high-tech islands (such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou) but these stand isolated in a vast ?technological wilderness?.

Moreover, there was a 41% drop in websites in 2010 as a result of a crackdown, supposedly on pornography and scams. According to a recent Carnegie Mellon University statistical analysis of 56 million messages, the rate of posts that are deleted is as high as 53% in Tibet and Qinghai; and is 12% in Beijing and 11% in Shanghai. The aces in the Party?s sleeve are allegedly apparent in the ?APT Number 12? (Advanced Persistent Threat) describing targeted attacks starting with the New York Times which had revealed top leaders ( including current President Xi Jinping?s relatives) wealth dossier in a series of articles last year.

From the online buzz, it appears that censorship in China is proving difficult, unproductive and unsuccessful. And this, despite the fact that China?s budget for internal security is greater than its military budget. Therein resides the paradox of an ?increasingly free China? that keeps ahead of an ?official China?.

The author is a Singapore-based sinologist, currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi Views are personal