Slamming the Door on Internet Freedom

Google entered China in 2005 after acceding to government insistence on censorship of search results. Ostensibly, Google acted on the belief that providing limited information was better than providing none. In 2009, for example, China blocked Google’s YouTube pages because of a video showing police beating Tibetans. Then in 2010, Google revealed that throughout the second half of 2009 a malware attack, Operation Aurora, had targeted the Gmail accounts of thousands of human rights activists as well as source configuration management (SCM), which controls changes in software. The company stopped censoring itself in reaction and announced it might therefore have to leave China. Baidu called this a financial move veiled in sanctimony while Georgetown University fellow Evgeny Morozov challenged Google’s story, saying, “it’s like they thought they were dealing with the government of Switzerland and suddenly realized it was China.”

The 2006 book Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World, by law professors Jack Goldsmith of Harvard and Tim Wu of Colombia, examines government Internet restrictions on anti-Semitism in Norway, hate speech in Germany, and child pornography in the U.S. Echoing their argument, People’s Daily refuted utopian notions of an unrestricted Internet and emphasized the need for regulation, citing non-consensual email surveillance in the West. The article assured gradual change, but asked intellectuals to consider China’s “weakness,” saying it must not follow the ruinous example of Gorbachev’s glasnost policies.

There were also objections against taking orders from the U.S. State Department and some foreign experts have questioned whether the focus on Chinese Internet freedom (by Global Network Initiative, NetFreedom Taskforce et al.) is not simply a continuation of U.S. foreign policy by other means. But others have argued such protests are merely attempts to justify censorship. Stepping in, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton eloquently compared blogs to the Berlin samizdat, underground publishing in the Eastern Bloc which emerged as a way to avoid Soviet censors. Clinton noted the harms of information asymmetry. Indeed, limits on intelligence, time or information do weaken reasoning ability. This is known as “bounded rationality.” Limits aren’t fungible, but limiting access to information can be as effective, and harmful, as limiting intelligence. In the end, Google quietly resumed self-censorship in China before being banned in 2014.

Unfortunately, assurances of “gradual change” or calls for patience belie the fact that Beijing is tightening its grip, not loosening it – Facebook was banned in 2008, and then Blogspot, Picasa, Twitter, Vimeo and Youtube were all blocked in 2009, followed by Gmail in 2010, and bans on Google+ and Wordpress in 2011, then Soundcloud in 2013 and BBC, Dropbox and Instagram in 2014, along with several Japanese and American TV shows and another round of foreign TV shows in 2015, coinciding with Education Minister Guiren’s vow to “never let [...] Western values enter our classes.” More recently, there has been a crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs), new laws requiring computer companies to divulge source codes, and Internet users having to register legal names.

Speaking in 2014 at the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, on “A New Era of U.S.-China Relations?” Gordon Chang recalled how the Hu administration arrested Microsoft’s attempt to acquire shares in Sichuan Changhong Electric, as well as several other similar examples, saying anti-foreign attitudes have only strengthened since, exemplified by a 2013 incident in which the representatives of about 30 foreign firms were pressured to write “self-criticisms.” According to Chang, Beijing uses nationalism as a cover for eliminating state business competitors, and such practices might end once the Chinese economy suffers as a result. But Chang suggests tariffs until then, saying the U.S. “can find other locations to manufacture goods [...] but Beijing cannot find other markets.”

China’s caution is not without justification – Western corporations are no saints – but Beijing’s isolationism is increasingly redolent of North Korean juche, or “self-reliance.” Deng Xiaoping often said that when opening the window for air, one had to expect some flies. The Golden Shield Project, or Great Firewall, was established to keep out the flies. But Xi seems more interested in using it to slam the door left open by Deng. The same door People’s Daily attacked Gorbachev for leaving open. The door of an open economy.

The Chinese evidently don’t mind. In Consent of the Networked, Rebecca MacKinnon argues Chinese are largely content with their alternatives to eBay (Taobao), Google (Baidu), Facebook (Weixin) and Twitter (Weibo). Congress has transferred roughly $10 million each year for the past few years to keep the door open, providing aid to broadcasters like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia (both banned in China) and helping fund fanqiang (“wall climbing”) programs, yet it still remains uncommon to meet Chinese with VPNs. Besides, focusing just on the Chinese government is somewhat unfair. Not only have Google and Microsoft willingly censored, Cisco Systems and other Western companies have faced lawsuits from human rights activists for providing Internet surveillance technology used to further Beijing’s oppression of religious groups.

The help has worked too. OpenNet Initiative, a study by Cambridge Security, Harvard Law, and Toronto University Citizen Lab concluded that the Chinese government has the world’s most sophisticated filtering software. This is not the West’s only credibility problem either. Consider the loathed wumaodang, or “Five Mao Army,” named after the 5 mao (80 cents) paid for each discussion they successfully steer according to certain principles, as laid out in a leaked directive instructing them to use examples of violence in the West to discredit democracy, argue that the West is forcing its values on others, and use the history of a “small and weak nation’s tears of blood to arouse Party love and patriotism.” It is disturbing, yet examples of state-sponsored Internet sock puppetry have their parallels in Britain’s Joint Research Intelligence Group, Israel’s hasbara, Russia’s web brigades, and America’s Operation Earnest Voice.

All of this does diminish the West’s moral high ground, but it also discredits the idea among Party hardliners that the Internet is a force-feeding tube for Western values. U.S. policymakers have long believed a strong China will be a stabilizing force, but if China continues to close the door, we should consider withdrawing our hand from it.