Landmark Study on Chinese Internet Censorship Is Published

Journalism professor, blogger and expert on Chinese censorship Rebecca MacKinnon and her team of researchers have just published the first ever study on how Chinese blog service providers (BSP) control and censor the postings of their users.

Their paper, titled “China’s Censorship 2.0: How companies censor bloggers,” also dispels any doubts that the government is the main culprit in this gargantuan censoring machine. It’s the service providers who are the real perpetrators of these crimes against free expression and free press.

“The censoring is done mainly by the companies that host the blogs because they must comply with government censorship demands in order to keep their business licenses,” says the study, indicating that the censoring apparatus is “very decentralized with wide variation from company to company.”

And those companies, such as Baidu, Yahoo! China, MSN, and Google.cn, have entire departments lavishly staffed by employees who do nothing but detecting “illegal content” on their servers.

“Politically sensitive content is deleted from the Web by company employees, or by computer programs written by company employees, either in response to official directives or often simply in anticipation of trouble,” the paper concludes.

The study points out that with 253 million users, China surpassed the United States by mid-2008 as the country with the most Internet users. It also cites official statistics saying that, “by the end of 2007, there were 47 million bloggers in China with 72 million blogs."

And most of them are hosted by Chinese companies who must comply with the government censors’ draconian conditions in order to stay in business. But foreign companies are also willing participants in this shameful game.
 
“While some foreign companies have opted not to comply and thus forego Chinese market opportunities,” says the study, “others have complied to varying degrees. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all offer censored versions of their search engines to the Chinese market in order to maintain good government relations and their business operations in China”

The survey presents three fundamental findings:

--First, censorship levels across 15 different BSPs varied even more than expected.
--Second, a great deal of politically sensitive material survives in the Chinese blogosphere, and chances for survival can likely be improved with knowledge and strategy.
--Third, censorship methods vary greatly from company to company, implying that companies do have at least some ability to make strategic choices.

The study also finds that bloggers in China are much more likely to avoid censorship than traditional journalists through a number of strategies.

In order to evade the BSP’s internal censors, Chinese bloggers frequently deploy satire, euphemisms, literary allusions, vague or coded phrases, and even graphics to convey critical messages. Chinese bloggers who write about current events and public affairs are also inclined to be realistic and pragmatic when deciding what to write, making decisions about what kinds of postings would bring too much trouble and aren’t worth the risk.

Finally, the authors of the paper draw interesting conclusions about Internet censorship in China and even strike a positive note about the future of free expression and free press in that country.

Despite the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state, people working in both old and new media are not entirely powerless: Individual choices, values, and actions by individual journalists are proven to have an impact on the quality and range of information and ideas available to the Chinese people.
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The findings of this study point to the need for more study — both of Chinese domestic Internet censorship as well as censorship in other countries. This study was highly experimental and limited in its scope, timeframe, and resources. Larger–scale testing would help to shed greater light on the way in which different kinds of content are censored.
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Finally, free expression advocates should consider how an “Internet user rights” movement might push for greater transparency and accountability by Internet companies.

Rebecca MacKinnon is an Assistant Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong, where she teaches online journalism. Her research and writing focuses on issues of online free speech, censorship, and citizen media, with an emphasis on China. She is co–founder of Global Voices, an international citizen media network, and a founding member of the Global Network Initiative. She is also a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo.