BEIJING - How can the Chinese government control the Internet? How can one government, no matter how authoritative, contain information coming from hundreds of millions of sources, on thousands and thousands corners of the Web, throughout the world, in real time?
The idea of watching what people do online seems so enormous, that most governments barely even try,. They focus resources on sex offenders, counterfeiters and the occasional bootlegger. Everywhere else is free to blog, chat and Facebook away in peace.
Not China. It's no secret that the country employs massive amounts of resources on information control in the web. Reading an article in a western newspaper gives the impression of a vast number of bureaucrats, sitting in cubicles somewhere in the outskirts of Beijing, each monitoring a different corner of the Internet. Offending comments are deleted upon posting, and extreme cases the person responsible gets in legal trouble.
Now that I'm actually in China, and behind this firewall, I can see that these active measures are only a small part of the control mechanisms. Far more important are the more passive controls in place.
The Chinese government couples access to the Chinese market with assurances from businesses that they will incorporate censorship software when designing products. The most famous case of this is Google.cn, whose headquarters are less than a mile from where a type this, where search results are filtered not by the government, but by controls voluntarily built into the engine by the company involved. Yahoo, Baidu, and other large Internet companies have similar measures, taking the pressure off the government to find each and every reference to what happened in that large square around 1990.
The rabbit hole goes even further. Chinese Internet providers and public institutions frequently offer two levels of Internet access. One option will be access to Chinese sites, or sites that are hosted in the People's Republic of China. The cost for this service can be quite low - here at Tsinghua, the charge is just 3Y a month. The other option is what most Western people consider second nature: the ability to access all sites from around the world. Getting that at Tsinghua costs a minimum of 30Y, with unlimited access costing 90Y.
While this might not sound like much - 90Y is only $11 - it's a fair sum for a Chinese student living on tiny government stipends. Ninety yuan is nearly a week's lodging, or 12 meals at the dining hall. It's a fair bet that most students pinch pennies and stick to the local-only Internet plan.
This is economic apartheid disguised as multi-tiered access. By pricing China's best and brightest students out of the entire World Wide Web, the government ensures they will only be exposed to domestic sites, where sensitive topics are filtered or blocked. Students don't know what other sites are producing, and therefore remain ignorant of other, contrary opinions. Worst of all, they may not even know that even exist.
Chinese control of the Internet is firmer and more subtle than I could have imagined. Six months ago, I would have been worried posting a message like this would get me in trouble with a shadowy Internet police force. Now I realize that the fate of this entry is even worse: No one in China is even going to read it all.
