In China right now, government departments, companies, sporting events, and citizens are in a sizzling Olympic mood. All are working hard to showcase the best of China in the next few months.
Prior to and during the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China’s online censorship is expected to get increased global scrutiny. To avoid criticism, China is apparently trying to make its filtering practices less obvious. This means installing and testing more sophisticated software and systems ahead of the Olympics.
Recently, I’ve notices some indications that this may be exactly what’s happening. These changes to how China’s Internet is working are fairly superficial in terms of what ordinary Chinese net users would encounter. As usual, they cannot be supported by confirmations by the censoring institutions themselves or by other supporting evidence, since all stakeholders involved are highly secretive. Also, I’m not claiming any technical background, so I cannot explain what is happening under the surface. There is only one reason I’m writing write about my speculative theory: taken together, these developments make sense.
The first sign of change came while I was abroad, trying to retrieve my e-mail from a China-based server. This process repeatedly failed. People close to China Telecom, one of the larger internet providers in China, explained to me that new software was being installed, making the Internet overall rather “unstable,” as they called it. That was interesting, since China’s filters used to concentrate on incoming net traffic from abroad — not traffic leaving the country.
That was enough to move me into “alert” mode. Once back in China I discovered some additional filtering issues, after the crisis in Tibet began. Some feeds in my RSS reader were now blocked. Previously, Google Reader had been an ideal way to circumvent China’s net filters.
Also, I noticed that suddenly stories were being blocked while they downloaded, after the first few paragraphs. Previously, stories were either blocked or not blocked entirely — no middle ground.
Then several events hit my radar screen that were blamed on the double T-crisis (Tibet and Taiwan): China’s censor went after video host Tudou, followed by incidents like the blocking and then unblocking of the BBC and YouTube.
If you only view those developments as isolated events, you might easily get confused. For instance, why would the net filters open up for the BBC and YouTube just as those incidents were in full swing (or at least, they could heat up again at any moment)? The unblocking of the BBC News site was especially interesting — it had been the only Western news organization that had been unable to get official permission to pass the Chinese Internet filters, while all other major Western news outlets were silently unblocked in the late 1990s.
Camouflaging online censorship means avoiding blanket bans and doing lots of testing. The Himalaya crisis (avoiding the T-word helps get around Chinese net filters) offered Chinese censors an aptly timed real-life testing opportunity for their new software. The unblocking of both the BBC and YouTube indicates those tests were a success — at least from the perspective of China’s censors. After the unblocking of YouTube, some net users in China ran tests of their own on the video site and found a combination of minor temporary blocks and subtle changes to site features — similar to existing censorship strategies for text-based content.
This theory could explain Tudou’s 24-hour outage last week, which I noted earlier. It’s possible that Tudou needed that time to install the new filtering software — a task that inside China is typically done by Web hosts and Internet service providers. This suggests that China’s upgraded systems are now trying to filter images. (Most previous censorship systems only filtered text content.)
If your news organization is covering the Olympics from China — or trying to serve the fast-growing online market there — how might these changes affect your strategies? How can news organizations in China and elsewhere adapt so as not to play into the increasingly adept hands of censors there?
