- BEIJING -- The man shadowing
the internet activists on the street was either spectacularly incompetent
or deliberately trying to intimidate. Each time they stopped, he stopped.
When they ate at a restaurant, he waited outside. When they doubled back
on themselves, he gazed down at his shoes until they walked past and then
continued following them.
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- The sight of the public security agent clumsily pursuing
three students, a monk and an old woman was almost comically out of step
with the times. But there was nothing funny about the risks they were taking.
Ducking into a tatty old dormitory in one of Beijing's most prestigious
universities, the activists got to work on a project that could have led
to their arrest and imprisonment.
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- In a tiny student room, one of them had connected three
computers and linked them to the internet. From here they run a weekly
chatroom for the most talked-about - and sometimes politically sensitive
- issues of the day.
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- On this occasion, they were taking their greatest risk
yet by inviting 77-year-old Gao Yaojie, a prominent Aids campaigner who
is under constant government surveillance, to discuss the HIV epidemic
caused by a state-backed blood collection policy.
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- While one of the students acted as the host, another
fielded email questions, and the third worked full-time to fight off attacks
on their server.
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- They don't know where the attacks are coming from, but
they suspect the government. It is reminiscent of the days of pirate radio
stations.
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- "We just want people to talk and think about important
issues facing China," said the 23-year-old technician. "It's
not illegal in any way, but there are people in authority who don't like
what we do. They would like to bring our system down."
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- As an Amnesty report revealed this week, the Chinese
government is using an increasingly heavy hand to try to silence the growing
whispers of opposition on the web. The group says 54 people had been arrested
for disseminating their beliefs through the internet by December - a 60%
increase on the previous year.
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- Their alleged crimes include organising online political
petitions, proselytising for the outlawed Falun Gong movement, and spreading
"rumours" about Aids and Sars. They face sentences of between
two and 12 years in prison. Four have died in detention and there are reports
of torture.
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- In part, the increase in arrests reflects the explosive
growth of internet use in China, where the number of surfers rose by 32%
last year to 78 million. But it also reflects the government's quandary
in trying to promote the economic, modernising side of the web, while suppressing
its political and subversive nature.
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- The flexible boundary between what is permissible and
what is prohibited was all too apparent in the case of Liu Di, a 23-year-old
student who went by the alias Stainless Steel Mouse.
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- After posting several essays online criticising government
control of the internet, she received a warning from her college tutors:
"People in high places have told us that you hold radical views. Stop
what you are doing."
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- A month later, she was arrested and held without trial.
"The way I was treated was absurd," Ms Liu told the Guardian,
after a huge outcry in China and abroad secured her release.
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- "I was in prison for a year, but they didn't show
me a single piece of evidence regarding the crime I was suspected of committing."
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- "I write in a more roundabout way now," she
says. "It's like a game. One word can be totally illegal, but you
can get away with alternative phrases that mean almost exactly the same
thing."
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- Like many members of China's online community, Ms Liu
believes the government has established an "internet police"
- rumoured to be 30,000 strong - which monitors websites and chatrooms.
This has never been confirmed, but the authorities have certainly developed
technology to block access to some websites, such as those of the BBC and
Amnesty International. Even search engines can be filtered so that no results
are returned for certain searches, such as "Falun Gong".
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- Internet cafes and internet service providers are also
under increasing pressure to join the government crackdown. The police
have told Netbar, an internet cafe with more than 100 computers in central
Beijing, to keep a record of the names and identification numbers of every
user, as well as a record of every site visited in the previous 60 days.
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- The cafe, owned by a subsidiary of the internet giant
Yahoo, has complied with the censorship to the point of installing site-blocking
software.
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- Many foreign hi-tech companies have been accused of sacrificing
principle for profit by colluding with the Chinese government's efforts
to restrict access.
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- Last month, Reporters Without Borders appealed to the
chief executives of 14 technology multinationals to put pressure on Beijing
to lift internet censorship and free jailed internet dissidents.
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- Web solidarity
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- But the list of prisoners is growing. Some have been
detained for expressing democratic views, such as the "New Youth Association".
Its four members, Jin Haike, Xu Wei, Zhang Honghai and Yang Zili, were
sentenced to more than eight years after their arrest last May.
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- In many other cases, the authorities have given no justification
for taking internet activists into custody. The tough measures sometimes
seem aimed simply at breaking up any sense of web solidarity.
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- Du Daobin was arrested in October shortly after he started
a petition calling for the release of Stainless Steel Mouse.
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- "He left for work, but never came back," said
Mr Du's wife, Xia Chunrong. "Two days later, the police searched our
house and took our computer. I haven't been allowed to see him since."
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- Three months on, she has not been told whether he will
stand trial. "If he did something illegal, they should at least let
the public know and let the people judge," she says.
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- Unfortunately, that appears to be exactly the opposite
of the intention of those who seek to clamp down on the internet.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1143011,00.html
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