WILL IT CHANGE?

In November 2005, the group of bloggers involved with CNblog.org “organized the first-ever Chinese bloggers’ conference in Shanghai.” The gathering was not a meeting about censorship and limitations, but a celebration of new possibilities.”

Isaac Mao, founder of CNblog.org, in his opening speech, said, “In the past, you could only share information with society in the structure given to you by authorities, [but now we want] ways to share information freely” (42).

“Blogs are playing their part in creating an independent space for discourse, interaction, and collaboration. Physical distances are no longer the barrier they once were for people with common concerns and interests. All of these factors can be expected to contribute to major socio-political change in the long run” (44).

To look only at the instances where bloggers conflict with government censors is to miss the slow, but “powerful socio-political change [that] can be expected to emerge as a result of the millions of online conversations taking place daily on the Chinese Internet: conversations that manage to stay comfortably within the confines of censorship” (44).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.

MSN SPACES: FOREIGN CENSORSHIP

Tests in December 2005 concluded that for the Chinese edition of MSN Spaces, a combination of automated and manual censorship was enforced; “users were automatically prevented from posting politically sensitive words such as ‘Falun Gong,’ [for example], in the titles of individual blog posts” (41).

If a user tried to save such a post, an error message stating the following would appear: “This item contains forbidden language. Please remove the forbidden language from this item” (41).

Although it was possible to post “forbidden language” in the body of the post, about 48 hours after blogs containing “politically sensitive phrases” were created, the URLs would be redirected and the blogs inaccessible.

These actions had not been taken by Chinese authorities “responsible for filtering and censoring the Internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers” (41).

Unlike in the United States, there is no “A-list” of influential political bloggers in China; in 2005, bloggers who posted “politically sensitive content” may have to continuously move from one blog host to another, with a new web address (42).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.

DETECTION OF SENSITIVE ISSUES, AND CENSORSHIP METHODS

“The Chinese government seems relatively unconcerned with the detailed means to “manage” user content as long as the end result is successful” (38).

1. Tests held in late 2005 concluded that mention of Tibetan independence or the banned Falun Gong religious movement on Bokee, then China’s “largest domestic blog-hosting site with 3.2 million bloggers,” took between 24 hours and one week to detect (38).

2. Mention of such sensitive subjects was detected and removed from Sina.com, “one of China’s largest and most well-established web portals which includes a fast-growing blog-hosting service,” within hours (38).

3. Blogcn, by using an automated censorship system, prevented the user from posting particular words and phrases altogether (38).

4. Blogbus allowed posts containing sensitive phrases to be published, but “the system’s keyword software would replace the offending phrases with an “'*' in place of each character in the banned phrase” (38).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.

DELEGATING CENSORSHIP TO PRIVATE BUSINESSES

Q: How does the Chinese government monitor millions of blogs?
A: It doesn’t.
It outsources. To whom? To blog-hosting businesses, who censor their “business processes in order to remain in the good graces of the authorities” (38).

Q2: How do these blog-hosting businesses censor?

A2: They keep lists of forbidden words, which are kept and updated by service providers who plug the keywords into monitoring and filtering software (38).

In February 2006, the Washington Post got a hold of a “forbidden word” list from one blog-hosting company; there were 236 words on the list; 18 of the words were obscenities. “The rest were related to politics or current affairs.” The “forbidden list” is not provided by the government, but is left to the company to create and design for the “government’s satisfaction” (38).

One of the blog-hosting companies with a “forbidden word” list was Microsoft’s MSN Spaces, the Chinese-language version of which was launched in the summer of 2005. The list was used to prevent users from posting words from the list in blog titles, and to flag blogs that may be “problematic” in the future” (38).

Because MSN Spaces was monitoring their blogs in this way, “the Chinese government agreed not to block MSN blogs at the Internet Service Provider level, as is often done with many other popular international blog services like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com” (38).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.

BLOGS USED POLITICALLY; ACTIVE CENSORSHIP FOLLOWS

BLOGS ARE USED FOR OPEN POLITICAL DISCUSSION:

In April 2005, the Chinese public became outraged by the alleged “historical revisionism of some textbooks that whitewashed” atrocities the Japanese did in China during World War II (36).

To organize action against allowing Japan into the U.N. Security Council, China used short message services (SMS), bulletin board services, and forums; “‘Strong Nation Forum,’ which happens to be hosted by the state-run People’s Daily” is an example of one such forum. Blogs were used more for discussion and less to organize events (37).

REACTION TO POLITICAL DISCUSSION ON BLOGS: ACTIVE CENSORSHIP:

By late Spring 2005, probably due to the fear that action and discussion occurring within the blogosphere may turn against the Chinese State, bloggers and all others hosting “non-commercial websites” had until June 30, 2005 “to register their identities and domain names and obtain a registration number which must be displayed on their site” (French 2005; OpenNet Initiative 2006).

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR A BLOGS' CONTENT?

Just as hosts of bulletin board systems were responsible to monitor and censor their content, so the companies running the blog hosting services were responsible (to the government) for the content on their users’ blogs.

Therefore, commercial blog hosting companies, such as MSN spaces and Bokee (formally BlogChina) and Blogbus, a blogging service based in Shanghai, agreed to monitor and censor the blogs on their services; if the hosting companies didn’t, the understanding was that there would be fines, revocations of business licenses, and other consequences (37).

If a blog hosting service finds information that “authorities might take particular interest in,” the service is “expected to hand over user information” (37).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.

ALTERNATIVES TO BLOGGING: 2002-2006

Why bulletin boards?

Even though blogs became much more popular, forums and bulletin boards were used more often because it is easier to “hide in the large crowd of fake user-names and cloak their anonymity more successfully” than it is to hide one’s identity on a blog.

Even though anonymity is an option on a blog, more technical skill is required to cover one’s tracks and hide from the authorities on a blog than is required in the “crowd” of a forum (36).

According to a Chinese Internet usage study performed by CASS, "by late 2005 44.8% of users surveyed used [the bulletin board system], while only 29.5% used blogs (Guo et al. 2005)” (36).

Censorship on bulletin boards:

Companies or academic institutions host bulletin board systems, and even though they’re supposed to monitor and censor what’s written on the boards, as long as sensitive keywords are avoided, topics that would otherwise get caught can slip through the board’s automated filtering software.

This means that politically sensitive information and opinions can get posted and left up for hours or even days before they are detected by a human monitor; the volume of postings can be so great that such sensitive information may not be instantly detected (36).

Government Crackdowns on Bulletin Boards:

This freedom is why, in 2004, the bulletin boards and forums became “the target of a government crackdown that deepened throughout 2005.”

One popular forum was known as “SMTH,” hosted at Tsinghua University (China’s equivalent of MIT); in the fall of 2004, any non-Tsinshua university students were blocked from posting.

Furthermore, anyone who wanted to post on the forum had to register their real names, which saw the end of the SMTH community, because most users were posting anonymously from outside the university. Similar crackdowns were happening on forums across Chinese universities.

How the Government Crackdowns lead to Blogging:

“Many [Bulletin Board System] users needing a new home for their online conversations turned to blogs.” Therefore, in late 2004, blog hosting companies such as Blogchina saw a drastic increase in new user registrations. (36).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.

BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE BLOGGING: 2002-2006

“The Chinese blogosphere exploded in size in 2005,” even though censorship measures were already in place - it is estimated that in January 2005, there were half a million Chinese blogs, and in July 2005, 5 million (Anderlini 2005) (35).

In a way, the Chinese blogosphere meant a loss of control; “China’s editors, station directors, and publishers had always acted as cultural “gatekeepers:” deciding who could and couldn’t become known through publication.

In a cultural power-shift, blogging began to show its “potential as a vehicle for alternative journalism” (36).

When Matthew Hurst of Intelliseek Inc./Blogpulse analyzed blog-posting activity within a 24-hour period, he found that Chinese users were three times more active on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces than users from any other country. U.S. users were in second place (Hurst 2006) (35).

AFP. "Blogger leads China to free-thinking revolution." No date. Top International News. 21 Jan 2008 <http://www.everyminutenews.com/headlines.php?id=46>.

The first Chinese language blogging tools:

In 2002, Isaac Mao, a “web entrepreneur,” met a Chinese schoolteacher via Blogger.com, and together they wrote one of the earliest Chinese blogs, and then founded CNblog.org.

CNblog.org became a “community of Chinese blog and social software enthusiasts who developed the first Chinese language blogging tools, promoting them among their friends and colleagues (Xiao 2004a)” (35).

Behring, Natalie. "The founder of China's largerst blog-hosting website, Bokee, Fang Xingdong in his Beijing office November 23, 2006." The Globe and Mail. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
servlet/story/RTGAM.20070110.gtwatchingfang10/BNStory/Technology/?cid=al_gam_nletter_dtechal>.

The first Chinese blog-hosting service:

“Meanwhile, in mid-2002 journalist and web entrepreneur Fang Xingdong set up China’s first blog-hosting service, Blogchina (now Bokee)” (35).

Bokee "is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day. 'Bokee' can [...] be translated as "plentiful guests" or "knowledgeable man."

York, Geoffrey. "Beijing's censors unleash a monster." Globe and Mail 10 Jan. 2007. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070110.gtwatchingfang10/BNStory/Technology/?cid=al_gam_nletter_dtechal>.

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.