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Standing guard: Chinese authorities try to rein in the Internet
China’s e-Rebels
A new Internet generation is outwitting the cybercops.
By Melinda Liu and Kevin Platt
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
    October 2 issue —  China’s rulers refuse to give up. They may have abandoned Mao’s unworkable daydreams of pure socialism and a classless society, but they are defending to the death his central dogma: the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s authority.  

   
 
       
   
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       NOW THAT ECONOMIC NECESSITY HAS DRAGGED the country into the age of e-mail and Web sites, Beijing has wasted no time setting up new police units to patrol the Internet. Anyone who might weaken the party’s control over people’s lives and minds is a target: hackers, democrats, pornographers, ethnic separatists and others who seem to defy the party line. The cybercensors have shut down local Web sites and blocked access to foreign sites run by human-rights groups, Tibetan exiles, the banned Falun Gong meditation movement and some Western media outlets.
        The clampdown is futile. As fast as Beijing can erect barriers, the country’s Net users keep finding ways around them. They know the government has access to any e-mail sent to or from mainland-based Internet service providers. No problem. Chinese privacy lovers can hook up to Yahoo or Hotmail for free e-mail accounts outside their government’s jurisdiction. The online cops can block access to any foreign Web site they deem unsuitable—but what of it? For anyone who knows how to navigate, the Web has “proxy servers,” sites designed to function as untraceable detours around such obstacles. The trick is hardly a state secret, even in China. Mainstream technology magazines there have run detailed reports on the servers, providing readers with the equivalent of how-to manuals.
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        Ultimately there’s one way China can stop the deluge of forbidden ideas: by unplugging itself. And that’s not likely. Beijing’s leaders are convinced that China’s future depends on embracing the Net. President Jiang Zemin said as much at an international computer conference a few weeks ago in Beijing. “We should deeply recognize the tremendous power of information technology and vigorously promote its development,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted him as saying. “The speed and scope of its transmission have created a borderless information space around the world.” His own son Jiang Mianheng has become an IT heavyweight in Shanghai.
  
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        Change is sure to come even faster after China joins the World Trade Organization, a milestone now expected within a few months. The market forces that are unleashed in China will make information technology “even cheaper, better and more widely available,” Bill Clinton told an audience at Johns Hopkins University’s graduate school of foreign affairs earlier this year. “We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we’re already an open society. Imagine how much it can change China.” Um, yes, a listener spoke up, but weren’t Chinese authorities at that very moment trying to control e-content and limit foreign ownership of Web-related companies in China? The president grinned. “Good luck,” he said. “That’s like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
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        The revolution has barely begun. So far the most blatant impact has been in realms the older generation tries to ignore, such as dating and popular music. But as the following profiles illustrate, the Internet has begun loosening the party’s control over other aspects of daily life: career choices, sexual freedom, political protest and, not least, the Internet itself. Roughly 85 percent of China’s Web users are between 18 and 35. By the end of this year their total number is expected to reach 20.8 million. Beijing-based Internet consultancy BDA China says the figure is nearly doubling every six months. At this rate the country’s online population will exceed 120 million by 2004, making China one of the three biggest Internet users in the world, along with Japan and the United States.
At the current growth rate, China’s online population will exceed 120 million by 2004, making it one of the three biggest Internet users in the world, along with Japan and the United States.

        Even then, don’t bet on instant democracy. Greater freedom, sure. But liberalization isn’t the same as democracy. The Internet is a great equalizer, serving as a podium for all comers regardless of their ideas’ merit—or lack of it. Hate groups can harness its power just as readily as social progressives. China’s online bulletin boards occasionally erupt with anti-Western diatribes and calls for an immediate invasion of Taiwan. In any case, China’s people have no intention of redesigning their culture according to Western specifications.
        This is not the Tiananmen generation. The less these young people have to deal with politics, the happier they are. Scores of self-described hackers and computer-security experts gathered several weeks ago for a conference in Beijing. “Hackers are like the cowboys of the American Wild West,” one attendee boasted to the local press. “The only laws they follow are the laws in their own heads.” That kind of individualism used to be unthinkable in China. Now it’s spreading like the Internet. Look ahead a few years—and multiply his voice by a hundred million.
       
CYBERKILLER ON THE LOOSE
       In his faded jeans and t-shirt, the young hacker could pass for an American college student. He calls himself Cyberkiller, but he hardly fits the stereotype of the crazed Internet vandal. He loves English novels, a fondness he developed as an undergraduate in Beijing. He doesn’t want his real name or his occupation published. His “patriotic” raids on U.S. Web sites have won applause from officials in Beijing. Those same officials would surely jail him for some of the attacks he has helped carry out against Chinese government sites. As Cyberkiller sees it, the enemy was the same in both cases: government bullying. He describes himself and his friends as “hackers for justice and freedom, trying to create a degree of fairness and individual rights in cyberspace that don’t exist in the real world.”
       They almost earned the status of national heroes last year, after NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Cyberkiller and his fellow hackers went on an anti-U.S. rampage, trashing several high-profile targets, including the Web site of the American Embassy in Beijing. Furious Chinese hackers around the world joined the online riot. A photo of Bill Clinton with a Hitler mustache appeared briefly on a U.S. government Web site. Early this year, Cyberkiller says, Beijing actually recruited some of his online associates to do battle against separatist Taiwanese hackers in a tit-for-tat war of Web site attacks.
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       Ultimately, however, the hackers’ only loyalty is to their own libertarian ideals. Cyberkiller says he knows people who do security work for official Web sites by day. By night, they turn around and hack any sites they consider to be “shoring up the party’s absolute rule”—including the sites they were hired to protect. In 1998, when Beijing set up its own Web site ostensibly devoted to human rights, Cyberkiller and his friends defaced it within days. “It was designed to fool the people,” he says. “We want China to evolve into a more just and democratic society.” It’s an immense undertaking—but not as impossible as it used to seem.
       
IT’S GOOD TO BE ‘BAD’
       In China as just about every-where else, sex is the Web’s star attraction—and a few months ago the star went supernova. Two uninhibited young women had published a pair of steamy quasi-autobiographical books, back to back. The literary rivalry between Mian Mian, 29, and Wei Hui, 27, quickly developed into a full-fledged feud, culminating in a bizarre public cat-fight on the Internet, with each writer claiming to be the one who deserved to be called a “bad girl.”
        After the Beijing government banned both books last April, their popularity soared higher than ever. Millions of pirated copies were sold, and the Chinese-language site goldnets.myrice.com posted electronic editions of both books in their entirety, attracting clicks by the hundreds of thousands. Beijing ordered the site to delete the material. The public’s fascination has hardly diminished since then.
        Instead the battle has launched a whole new Chinese genre: “pretty woman literature.” Mian Mian’s anthology “Candy” includes a short story about drug addiction and sex with foreigners in the sleazy boomtown of Shenzhen. Wei Hui’s novel “Shanghai Baby” features heroin abuse and sex with foreigners in Shanghai. Mian Mian accuses Wei Hui of stealing ideas from “Candy.” Wei Hui accuses Mian Mian of badmouthing “Shanghai Baby” to drum up publicity for her own book. Wei Hui says “Shanghai Baby” was an instant hit because “China is hungry for a bad girl.” Nonsense, Mian Mian replies, Wei Hui is really just a good girl posing as bad. Thousands of Web sites and chat rooms sprang up to revel in the rivalry.
        Literary spats rarely get so raunchy, even in the West. One writer says the other masturbates while she works. Each says the other doesn’t know what she’s talking about on the subject of having sex in public toilets. (For a while, Japanese tourists were flocking to Shanghai’s YY Club to see the cubicle that had inspired the dispute.) A few years ago talk like this could have ended in a prison sentence. For Wei Hui and Mian Mian it has led to American book contracts. The online furor over “Baby” inspired Bruce Humes, a U.S. Web surfer, to become its translator. Mian Mian promises that the U.S. edition of “Candy” will be even racier than the version that got banned in Beijing. “I’m replacing details about sex and drugs that were edited out so the book could be published in China,” she says. She keeps in touch with her fans via e-mail. Sometime they send samples of their own writing. “The Internet will do wonders for such young authors,” she predicts. The best thing about it? “No police.”
       
THE RISK-TAKER
       Risks don’t scare Sunny Xu. Far from it. For relaxation the 22-year-old computer-network engineer likes to go parasailing and bungee-jumping. Still, he believes in looking before he leaps. When he finished college in 1999, authorities routinely assigned him to a government job, as they have done for generations of new graduates. Xu’s assignment was at a Railway Ministry office in the industrial city of Lanzhou, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. But unlike other young professionals before him, Xu didn’t quietly take the job. Instead he asked for additional details—and got an angry reply from the boss himself. “You don’t need to know more,” the bureaucrat said. “You’ll work for us whether you like it or not.”
        Xu didn’t feel so much hired as kidnapped. So he did the logical thing: he ran for his life. As punishment for spurning the job assignment, his school demanded a “fee” of nearly $2,000 to release his dang an, the personnel file that all urban Chinese must have. Without it they can’t legally hold a job, rent a city apartment, apply for a passport or get married. It takes more than a year for an average city dweller to earn $2,000, but Xu didn’t despair. He headed to Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, the capital’s funky, overcrowded answer to Silicon Valley. Through an online service he easily found work at a dot-com company called Capitalnet.
        He still wanted his file. Without it he was technically an illegal worker; he couldn’t even have sued if his boss had reneged on his paycheck. Capitalnet paid without balking—and pretty well by Chinese standards: roughly $500 a month. In July, Xu finally managed to ransom his file. He then found a new, higher-paying job. Now he’s about to get his first passport, for a business trip to Hong Kong. His hectic hours don’t leave much free time for bungee-jumping. But Xu has already made the leap of a lifetime.
       
DISSIDENT.COM
       If Beijing’s rulers hoped jail would break his spirit, Lin Hai disappointed them. The Shanghai software engineer proudly calls himself “China’s first Internet prisoner.” In March 1998 he was arrested for providing 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to VIP Reference, a pro-democracy online magazine in the United States. A court convicted him of “inciting the overthrow of the state.”
        In prison, sharing a century-old cell with a pair of drug dealers, Lin got his first taste of Cultural Revolution-style re-education techniques. “We had to do political study sessions, and prisoners had to criticize other prisoners,” he says. The guards took care to keep him away from computers. The warden himself asked for advice on fixing his personal desktop—but he wouldn’t let Lin go anywhere near the machine.
        Lin’s troubles continued after his release a year ago. Few employers want to hire a former political prisoner. But unlike former dissidents, Lin, 32, had the Internet to help him. He found paying work online, and he’s even considering a couple of U.S. job offers.
       Recently Beijing tried to shut him down by blocking direct Chinese access to his U.S. Web site freechina.com. A sizable Chinese audience manages to see the site anyway, and Lin still gets his e-mail forwarded to him. “Just send a message to anything at freechina.com, and I’ll receive it,” he says. “My e-mail addresses are unlimited.” Just like his dreams.
       © 2000 Newsweek, Inc.
       
 
       
   
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