[Reader-list] India and China

[Ravi Sundaram]

I got found this today..The comparisons with our own situation in India is
interesting. Even though Indian papers ritually parrot the govt. line about
India having no state control on media, the Chinese laws are quite close to
our own in the internet area, the same insecurity of elites, the same
strategies of guerilla warfare by users to evade....

Ravi
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China's Safe Haven: Net Cafes 

Reuters 
10:10 a.m. June 12, 2001 PDT 
BEIJING -- The soft glow of computer screens lights the faces of hundreds
of students and 20-somethings crammed into the Feiyu Internet cafe near
Beijing University, 24 hours a day. 

The basement cafe is one of roughly 1,000 in Beijing, where young Chinese
can anonymously log onto the Internet and browse any site they fancy, such
as news or sports -- or even banned pornography sites. 

 To Beijing, these cafes are a dangerous window into an electronic world
beyond the Communist Party's control, and in April the government launched
the second major clampdown against the popular venues in just over one year. 

Internet cafes offer people in China a way to get online and speak up
without identifying themselves, making cyberspace almost impossible to
regulate, despite a slew of high-profile arrests in China since March. 

"Thanks to Web cafes, they are completely unable to control me," said Sun
Hang, a software programmer in Beijing. 

"It's very difficult, to be honest, to control by identity," said Edward
Zeng, chairman and CEO of Sparkice, an e-commerce and Web cafe group, who
enjoyed some notoriety in 1998 when President Clinton visited his shop in
Shanghai. 

Cyber cafes create a layer of anonymity between their patrons and police in
China, where home and office Internet connections are easily identified by
their Internet protocol address. 

"In Internet cafes, if I wanted to say something on the Internet, nobody
could find me," Sun said. 

That anonymity is important, because if China's content laws are broken on
a personal homepage or a message board of a major Web site, authorities are
likely to trace it back to its source. 

The Ministry of Information Industry, the State Council Information Office,
the State Security Ministry -- China's secret police -- and local police
all monitor websites looking for "hot button" issues: Taiwan, Tibet --
which China annexed in 1950 -- and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong,
she said. 

Over 20 percent of the more than 20 million Web surfers in China -- where
most people cannot afford a PC -- use cyber cafes, an official survey said
this year. 

In April, the government banned Internet cafes from residential buildings
and areas near government offices and schools. 

Police said a new round of inspections of the cafes across China for
evidence of illegal access to banned websites or subversive messages were a
precondition for renewing licenses. 

Wang Yuesheng, who owns 24 of the Feiyu brand Web cafes in Beijing, said
police raid his no-frills cafes twice a month to search browsers for
evidence of having visited Falun Gong Internet sites. 

In May, local media reported Beijing police had shut down at least two such
haunts -- one for being unlicensed and the other because its computers had
been used to access banned websites. 

In April, China reiterated a long-standing rule that Web cafes must keep
customer logs. 

But proprietors of the cafes said the rule is often broken. 

"The customer is God," said Wang, who would sooner bend the rules than turn
away a customer who had no identification. 

However, clerks there said a student card would fetch a 30 percent discount
from the 5 yuan (60 cents) hourly rate. 

In contrast to the cafes' lax rules, the Web executive said her firm, which
hosts bulletin boards and homepages, regularly handed user IP addresses
over to the police, for fear of being forced out of business. 

Unlike North America or Western Europe, where privacy is a hot topic,
China's laws give Web users no protection from snooping police. 

Instead, ISPs are required to keep records of Web users' online movements. 

"These records are specifically intended to be available to law enforcement
agencies for scrutiny by them," said Warren Rothman, Beijing counsel for
law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. 

Chinese laws broadly ban "socially destabilizing content," "breaches of
public security," "divulging state secrets" and pornography on the Internet. 

But police rarely catch dissidents at cyber cafes even if a digital trail
from an illegal message leads there, because the venues hook up numerous
computers to the same Internet connection -- and a single IP address --
Feiyu's Wang said. 

At least seven arrests of cyber dissidents since March show a push by China
to stem subversion on the Web -- which carries a maximum penalty of 10
years in prison, a rights group said. 

"Since March, government offices have boosted their checks of these
political cases," said Frank Lu of the Hong Kong-based Information Center
for Human Rights and Democracy. 

In May, China charged four intellectuals with subversion after they were
detained in March for using the Internet to organize a discussion group on
political reform, the group said. 

Earlier last month in Shandong province, Wang Jinbo was arrested for
"libeling the police on the Internet," the group said. 

According to the rights group, China arrested at least two others last
month for political statements on the Internet.