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Internet prods Asia to open up
By Kathleen McLaughlin
September 9, 2004
Shanghai – As the Internet sweeps across Asia, it is bringing with it a strong
challenge to the region's authoritarian governments: a freer exchange of
information and ideas. Nowhere more so than in China, where the government has
mounted a huge effort to filter Internet content. The "Great Firewall of China"
is manned by at least 30,000 censors who blocked as many as 50,000 websites in
the first half of 2002, according to a US State Department report on China's
human rights.
Just this week, Beijing introduced stringent penalties against purveyors of
Internet pornography, including life imprisonment for those behind major sites
that receive more than 250,000 hits. "Pornographic" is left undefined.
Those who study the Internet and its impact on Asia say that although the
region is rife with censorship efforts like those in China, freedom is relative
and increasing by degrees. The free-wheeling and expansive nature of the online
world has proved difficult to control, pushing Beijing and similar governments
in the region to make concessions, much as they had to do in entering
Western-style economics and trade, say analysts.
"The Internet will make any country freer," says Ang Peng Hwa, a professor at
Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. "If you have the Internet, you're
connected to the world. If you want to be a part of the world, you have to play
by the norms of the world. The world norms lean toward a freer Internet."
China's massive firewall is already showing cracks under the weight of the
Internet's expansion. The pressure has come from innumerable sources, including
an onslaught of weblogs, open-source directories, and projects like Wikipedia,
an "open-content" encyclopedia.
Censorship has narrowed
Five years ago in China, most Western newspaper websites were blocked from
viewing. Today, the Chinese censors who watch the Internet target more specific
sites - chat forums on ultrasensitive topics like Tibetan liberation and the
Falun Gong religious movement.
(Beijing does not actually label sites as "blocked." Instead, when a user
clicks on a blocked site, the page will begin to load, slowly, and then the
user is redirected either to an error message or back to a Chinese search
engine.)
So while the average Chinese still can't walk into an Internet cafe in Ningbo
and pull up the homepage of the Taiwan government, he can read The New York
Times.
Even some sensitive topics, surprisingly, are readily available in China. A
quick browse through Wikipedia's Chinese-language version for the "June 4,
Tiananmen" entry offers a broad look at the Democracy movement of 1989 and its
violent end. Without using any special software or proxy servers, a Chinese web
user can view the famed photo of a lone man facing down tanks outside the
square 15 years ago in Beijing.
As countries like China become more open to international business and
globalization, gradually, "the Internet will become more open and the
restrictions will become less onerous," says David Goldstein, an Internet
policy consultant based in Sydney, Australia.
Residents of Asian countries are projected in the next few years to make up
more than half of the world's online population.
Across the Asia-Pacific region, Internet freedom conditions vary and tend to
mirror how individual governments have attempted censorship of other media -
films, television, books, and radio programming - in years past. So far, the
Internet is pushing boundaries in a positive manner, observers say.
"For countries which previously managed gatekeeping regimes, the Internet has
been a constructive test of governments' assumptions" about controlling
information, says Chin Saik Yoon, the Malaysia-based chief editor of the
Digital Review of Asia Pacific. "Most have responded well, and information
flows in these countries have been re-energized. This change has led to better
engaged citizens and hopefully, in time, to more prosperous information
societies."
But even advanced technology and widespread Internet access do not
automatically equate with freedom, several organizations report.
South Korea, for instance, is often held up as a model for its foresight and
investment that led to its becoming the world leader in broadband access. It's
estimated that more than half of all South Koreans have Internet access and
most of those who go online do so via broadband.
Yet South Korea is not above Net censorship. In July, two students were fined
for violating national election laws by posting material online that mocked
political candidates. Others in South Korea have been arrested for promoting
communism via the Web, and the government blocked a reported 18,000 Web pages
from public view last year, according to Paris-based Reporters Without Borders
(RSF).
Japan, Taiwan get high marks
In its 2004 report "Internet Under Surveillance," RSF analyzed Internet
censorship and filtering trends worldwide and gave troubling marks to most
Asian countries. Only Japan and Taiwan earned positive grades for Internet
freedom.
In Burma, the report says, public Internet connections are rare, "partly for
reasons of poverty but mostly because of the military regime's harsh crackdown
on freedom of expression." Totalitarian North Korea, likewise, offers no known
public access to the Internet, a potential window onto the outside world. In
heavily policed Vietnam, seven "cyberdissidents" are in prison.
Quite another experience is happening in Mongolia, where the government has
used international grants to set up a widely-used open government forum. If
they stick to basic courtesy, those with Internet access in the vast reaches of
Mongolia can discuss public policy online, and be certain the prime minister
will read the message boards at least once every two weeks. The forum's input
is often discussed at Cabinet meetings and other policy-making venues.
While such gains are important, there is no guarantee that the Internet by
itself will create a "freer" world overall, Yoon says. The outcome depends on
how the medium is used and controlled - and by whom.
But, the Internet's flow of information, he says, "combined with satellite TV
and international news channels has prodded national and local media to be more
forthright in their coverage of local issues so as to compete with foreign
sources."
In one prominent example, e-mail, mobile phone text messaging, and
impossible-to-ignore world news coverage that made it to China in part via the
Internet, are widely credited with forcing the central government to go public
with the facts and scope of the 2002-03 SARS epidemic.
Greater openness has begun and will continue, if for no other reason than that
it's just too large to stop, say analysts. Despite its firewall efforts, the
Chinese government is not stopping people from buying PCs or signing up for
cheap Internet access. The country has an estimated 87 million Internet users
this year, nearly four times the number in 2000, according to the data website
www.internetworldstats.com.
"It will become more flexible," Ang predicted. "To block things, you really
need to deploy manpower and that is a costly proposal."
Internet use shifts to Asia
More Internet users are from Asia than from any other region. However, only a
small - but growing - percentage of people in Asia actually have Internet
access.
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