NYT
February 4, 2008

Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

WUHAN, China — As an 18-year-old student with an interest in the
Internet, Zhu Nan had been itching to say something about the
country’s pervasive online censorship system, widely known here as the
Great Firewall.

When China’s censors began blocking access to the popular photo-
sharing site Flickr, Mr. Zhu felt the moment had come. Writing on his
blog last year, the student, who is now a freshman at a university in
this city, questioned the rationale for Internet restrictions, and in
subsequent posts, began passing along tips on how to evade them.

“Officials in our country claimed that Internet censorship is done
according to the law,” Mr. Zhu wrote. “If so, why not let people know
about this legal project, and why, instead, ban the Web sites that
publicize and examine those legal policies? If you’re determined to do
this, you shouldn’t be afraid of criticism.”

Mr. Zhu’s obscure blog post and his subsequent activism is a small
part of what many here regard as a watershed moment. In recent months,
China’s censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often
blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the
process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously
had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the
controls.

And all of it comes at a time of increasing risk for those who choose
to protest. Human rights advocates say the government has been
broadening its crackdown on any signs of dissent as the Olympic Games
in Beijing draw near.

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not
appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here
are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites
focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many,
in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is
carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly
seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of
restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube,
Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the
public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The
mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined
social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users
against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking
of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who
develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based
word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page
owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or
share links to programs that will help evade it.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the
surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that
they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that
some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no
idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s
literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the
controls after a friend’s blog was blocked. “I was really annoyed at
first,” Mr. Pan said. “Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I
received an order that my Web site, which is about children’s
literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier.”

Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for
overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites, and then he used a
historical allusion to mock his country’s censorship system.

“Many people don’t know that 300 years after Emperor Kangxi ordered an
end to construction of the Great Wall, our great republic has built an
invisible great wall,” he wrote. “Can blocking really work? Kangxi
knew the Great Wall was a huge lie: just think how many soldiers are
needed to guard those thousands of miles.”

A 17-year-old blogger from Guangdong Province who posted instructions
on how to get to YouTube, overcoming the firewall’s restrictions, was
no less philosophical. “I don’t know if it’s better to speak out or
keep silent, but if everyone keeps silent, the truth will be buried,”
wrote the girl, who uses the online name Ruyue. “I don’t want to be
silent, even if everyone else shuts up.”

The Chinese government seems particularly wary of video-sharing sites
like YouTube, and has recently tightened regulations on domestic
Internet providers in ways that are aimed at controlling such
services.

Others, meanwhile, have gone beyond launching Internet-based responses
like these and taken more direct action. One such person is Du
Dongjing, 38, an information technology engineer in Shanghai who sued
a branch of China Telecom for contract violation because of the
service provider’s unacknowledged restrictions on Web content.

In this case what initially angered Mr. Du was the surprise blocking
of his own business Web site last February. The site markets personal
finance software, and had no editorial content of any kind. When the
service provider failed to explain why the link went dead, Mr. Du took
the phone company to court.

His lawsuit was rejected by a Shanghai court in October, but the case
has been heard in appeal. “The Americans have an expression, ‘You
can’t fight City Hall,’ ” Mr. Du said. “However, I believe that withthe help of today’s Internet, the mood of the public, I can win this
case. I can even make a contribution to improving Chinese democracy.”

Even as anticensorship activism spreads, views are divided about
whether a grass-roots campaign can prevail. Some see strong continued
popular resistance to the limits imposed by tens of thousands of well-
financed government technicians operating powerful computers and
predict a breakthrough.

Yuan Mingli, who created an anti-Great Firewall evasion group because
of his love for Wikipedia, said the government was already at work on
new generations of Internet technology aimed at insulating Chinese
users even more from the rest of world. But he predicted its failure.
“That’s impossible, fundamentally, because people’s hearts have
changed,” he said, adding that the system would “eventually break down
precisely because China cannot be completely disconnected to the
outside world anymore.”

For some of the anticensorship activists, creating a broader awareness
of censorship is itself a victory. “If you don’t know what’s on top ofyou, than you won’t fight back against it,” said Li Xieheng, a blogger
who wrote a program he named Gladder, meaning Great Ladder, to help
users of the Firefox browser overcome Great Firewall restrictions.
“It’s just like many people not feeling that China isn’t free. They’re
not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that’s just the
power of media control.”

Mr. Li said he expected the Great Firewall to continue adapting to the
tactics of its opponents. The movement, though, has proved the power
of public opinion as an important limitation of the censor’s power, he
said. “Why don’t they just take Google down?” he asked. “It’s because
they don’t want to have a scene and have everybody know. A lot of
people came to know about the system because of Flickr, and that is
something the system needs to weigh.”

Fan Wenxin contributed reporting from Shanghai.