Analysis: China, the Net and free speech

From...

by Anya Schiffrin

(IDG) -- A pro-democracy activist in China was put on trial Tuesday in western China in the first-known criminal prosecution for publishing political materials on the Web.

Computer engineer Huang Qi was arrested June 3 after publishing articles commemorating the 1989 protests in Tiananmen square on his Web site, 6-4tianwang.com. The "6-4" in the URL is a reference to the date of the government crackdown of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Western activists and news organizations reported hundreds, maybe thousands, were killed when the Chinese military broke up the protests. The Chinese government has always played down the military action.

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Qi has also put information on his site about the democracy movement, Falun Gong and the independence movement in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang.

The trial -- which ended midday -- was closed to the public, but reports that appeared on the Web stated Qi fainted during the hearing and looked as though he had lost weight during his incarceration. Qi has also been beaten while in custody, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Qi's prosecution is the latest and highest-profile attempt by the Chinese government to control the Internet. In 1999, the government convicted Lin Hai, a computer company owner in Shanghai, after he provided e-mail addresses to a pro-democracy group.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations have spoken out against Qi's prosecution and expect there could be other prosecutions in the future. Human Rights Watch is pushing global ISPs such as Microsoft (MSFT), AOL and AT&T (T), among other tech companies, to lobby the Chinese government about this case and their general stance on freedom of expression. After all, HRW argues, it is in these companies' interest to see unrestricted Internet access in a major market such as China.

The Chinese government will likely face its next major digital free-speech challenge in April, when a Hong Kong-based publisher is expected to post highlights from the controversial new book The Tiananmen Papers (excerpted in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs). The book has created a lot of buzz among China-watchers, because it includes reportedly secret documents from high-level Politburo meetings that took place during the 1989 student protests. Much of the information in the book confirms what analysts outside China had already suspected about how members of the Chinese leadership viewed the protestors, but the documents will be news to most of the Chinese public.

"When this information is put online it will be a real test of the Chinese government's policy toward the Internet. This kind of information is so dangerous for Beijing because ordinary Chinese people have never had this sort of insight into their leaders' decision-making process," says Minky Worden, the electronic media director of Human Rights Watch.

China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore are just a few of the countries that want to use the Internet to speed up economic development while limiting exposure to political news deemed subversive by the government. They have been able to block access to a number of controversial sites, but can't always stop people from looking at sites hosted overseas. Qi's site is now hosted in the U.S., and the Human Rights Watch said their news on Malaysia is frequently downloaded by Malaysians seeking alternative information to the coverage of the state-run media in Malaysia.

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Crossing borders
(Publish.com)
Privacy coalition backs new pledge
(InfoWorld.com)
Groups seek to protect anonymous Net posters
(IDG News Service - IDG.net)
FTC to focus on consumer profiling
(Computerworld)
Wiretapping your e-mail
(The Industry Standard)
Vietnam to increase Internet capacity five-fold in 2001
(IDG News Service - IDG.net)
Military mulls battening down net hatches
(Network World Fusion)
How a firewall works
(Network World Fusion)

Human Rights Watch

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