Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and e-governance, the dynamics of censorship are intimately enfolded in regional
and national political structures.
3.2.1 China
In a country with more than 513 million internet users in December, 2011, Chinese
internet censorship is arguably the world's most severe (Kahn
2002
). The Com-
munist Party of China has long exerted strict, centralized control over flows of
information within and across the nation's borders, largely through the Ministry of
Information Industry (MII), although internet policing is conducted primarily
through the Ministry of State Security. The state has encouraged internet usage,
but only within an environment that it controls, and cyberspace in China remains
relatively free compared to the traditional media. In the early phases of internet
development, the state did little to regulate cyberspace, but as chat rooms and
blogs pushed the boundaries of allowable dissent with a steady stream of criticism
of government officials, it began to tighten control significantly after 2000
(Bi
2001
). Indeed, for the first decade the internet likely strengthened the
government's control, although as China's population of netizens grew explo-
sively, it increasingly became a vehicle for challenges to the state's authority
(Hachigian
2001
), leading to increasingly harsh repression. In 2005, the OpenNet
Initiative (
2005
) declared that ''China operates the most extensive, technologically
sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of internet filtering in the world.'' The
Chinese government has been blunt in its justification for censorship, asserting its
necessity to maintain a ''harmonious society.''
The government deploys a vast array of measures collectively but informally
known as the ''Great Firewall,'' which includes publicly employed monitors and
citizen volunteers, screens blogs and email messages for potential threats to the
established political order. There are numerous components to the Great Firewall
that operate with varying degrees of effectiveness. International internet connections
to China are squeezed through a selected group of state-controlled backbone net-
works. Popular access to many common Web services, such as Google and Yahoo!,
is heavily restricted (MacKinnon
2008
; Paltemaa and Vuori
2009
). The national
government hires armies of low-paid commentators, commonly called by the
derogatory term the ''five-mao party,'' (slang for the cash amount of 50 cents), to
monitor blogs and chat rooms, inserting comments that ''spin'' issues in a light
favorable to the Chinese state. Some municipal governments take censorship into
their own hands: Beijing, for example, uses 10,000 volunteer internet monitors
(Wines
2010
). However, a large share of censorship occurs via internet companies
themselves (MacKinnon
2009
), which monitor chat rooms, blogs, networking ser-
vices, search engines, and video sites for politically sensitive material in order to
conform to government restrictions. Websites that help users circumvent censorship
like anonymizer.com and proxify.com are prohibited. Users who attempt to access
blocked sites are confronted by Jingjing and Chacha, two cartoon police officers who
