China Cracks Down on its
Online Heroin Joints

l a u r a m c c a n d l i s h

As the unofficial "China correspondent" for Libertas, I'll shift my focus east on this emerging issue surrounding the crackdown of Internet cafes. Due to pervasive government control in China, the Internet offers the most attractive and democratizing option towards receiving outside news, though the government obsessively monitors to strike subversive sites (and basically all global news sources). In China last fall, I maintained my sanity and outside-China Daily consciousness through an AOL-browser hooked up to my computer as well as a preferred link to sites like the New York Times, which slipped past government blockages. While technologies such as SafeWeb used to allow free surfing by disguising subversive sites as more benign addresses, SafeWeb and other sites such as Voice of America were shut down due to increased control and unmanageable costs to maintain. Despite the restrictions, Chinese continue to flock to the Internet, primarily to domestic sites, as international e-businesses really struggle to meet China's strict regulations. The tension in Chinese computer technology is aptly described by anthropologist Eriberto Lozada: "Chinese global imaginings in the world's fastest growing computer market have become saturated with images of a localized cyberculture." This localized cyberculture is particularly subjected to government policing of the Internet cafes that have flourished in China, especially outside the city hubs. Because such cafes were ineffectively monitoring content, by this summer the Chinese government had closed over 2,000 cafes, while forcing an additional 6,000 spots to suspend services until they have proven they are in line with state agencies that oversee dispersal of information and natural security. By this winter, some sources claim as many as 17,000 cafes were closed while thousands more were ordered to install surveillance software.

Like so many issues in a country of capitalist weeds for future communist crops, the Internet polarizes the Chinese government by being attractive for its economic opportunities while the breadth of sites spiral out of government control. The government is also officially concerned about hazardous effects for teenagers, as some parents claim their children don't return home from the all-night cafes for days at a time. The government could focus its energy on fostering communication between parents and children (while also perhaps tackling other crucial yet neglected issues like safer sex education!) rather than taking such drastic and censuring actions. Chinese president Jiang Zemin also demanded the government tighten laws protecting teens from brainwashing through pornographic or violent online material. The pot calls the kettle black: the Chinese government guards against the "brainwashing" of pornographic Internet sites and religious groups like Falun Gong by brainwashing towards a pure and protected Chinese state. Chinese authorities are particularly scared of web access to subversive sites countering the government's position in such black-listed battles: Falun Gong, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Muslim separatists in China's northwest--as well as all general sites advocating anti-communist notions of free speech. A number of Internet dissidents have been arrested, many of whom are Chinese academics, either for political or religious activism. The Digital Freedom Network has published a list of such individuals detained for online activity at http://dfn.org/focus/china/netattack.htm.

As one analyst from the International Data Corporation noted, such restrictions have made Internet access in China the equivalent of web surfing in 1995. Networked games like Mech Warrior 3 and Age of Empires, which cost the equivalent of about 50 cents/hour to play at a cafe, have become a popular social activity for high school friends. Newer restrictions limit under eighteen-year olds to daytime hours on the weekends at the cafes, and an adult must accompany those under age fourteen--though over half of China's regular Internet users are under age 25. Using the paranoid rhetoric against institutions that promote "delusion" (like the government's fear of narcotics and organized religion), last spring a website published opinions on Communist Party leaders' fear of the effects of so-called "online heroin" on youth.

Despite restrictions, Chinese Internet cafes are thriving, especially in business and university districts, and surprisingly in smaller towns where few people can afford personal computers. Most Chinese, even in metropolitan areas, access the Web publicly, though many cafes in areas near schools have been shut down to insure control and to "protect" the youth. According to a survey by the China Internet Network Information Center last spring, just over 20 percent of the 22.5 million Internet users surf at such cafes, while there were reported to be as many as 26.5 million users by this past summer. With Bush's tour in East Asia last week, questions of democratic reforms were raised through his meeting with Jiang Zemin in Beijing (which happened to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Richard Nixon's famous visit). In their recent New York Times article, "Warming Up to China, Neglecting Democracy," Bei Ling and Andrea Huss beg for freedom of expression amidst deceiving appearances in a booming and reluctantly liberalizing China, pleading, "When will China's people be able to savor and explore the fullest meaning of that phrase, "freedom of expression?" Improving the rights, political freedom, and education of almost 1.3 billion people should be enough motivation for all to support increased freedom of speech implementation in China, but Ling and Huss further suggest that without media freedom in China, images of American democracy and power "with some spin, can easily be presented as a hateful American hegemony." Attention to censorship and control in China can also further sensitize us to our complacent assumptions that pure objectivity exists in our own free-speaking media sources.