CAPP Events: 2003

Archive: CAPP Events
2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002

China and the Internet: A Game of Cat and Mouse?

On December 12, 2002, CAPP hosted a presentation at RAND’s Santa Monica office by Guo Liang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and a well-known authority on China's Internet, about China's Internet censorship and usage. Guo is a partner in the World Internet Project (WIP), a global ten-year longitudinal study of both users and non-users to gage the impact of the Internet on society, politics, and economics.

Guo Liang conducted door-to-door surveys in selected cities to examine Internet use in China and determine the effects of its growth on a closed culture like China. “We wanted to see how much open technology makes people more open-minded,” Guo explained. The Internet came to China relatively late. Until 1995, only a select group of academics and scholars used the Web. Ever since it became commercially available, the government has facilitated its growth but also attempted in various ways to control its use. For example, the government has required all users to register with a personal identification number to facilitate tracking their online activity, blocked certain search engines and web sites, and required web sites to employ content monitors to monitor bulletin board web sites, chat rooms, and e-mail messages.

Despite the myriad restrictions, however, Internet use in China is growing very quickly. Guo said that while global Internet use doubles every year, China’s Internet use doubles every six months. According to Guo, researchers wondered, “If the Internet is highly controlled by the government and the control is successful, why are so many people going online? And how can they access content differently from traditional media?”

Researchers discovered a very sophisticated game of “cat and mouse”, as Guo described it, between users and the government. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in China provide easy and cheap access to the information highway. Users in China can purchase pre-paid, anonymous Internet access cards, making it more difficult for the government to track their usage. The use of proxy servers to route traffic outside of China’s “Great Fire Wall”, as Guo described it, to access forbidden web sites is growing. And although the regulation requiring users to register still exists, it is almost universally ignored. In fact, the CASS survey showed that government control of the Internet is less of a barrier to usage than financial constraints. Almost 70% of all survey respondents cited the lack of a computer or the expense involved as the primary reason they do not venture online.

Also, despite the government’s attempts to control content, most respondents viewed the Internet positively and indicated that it gives them “more opportunities to express their political views” and to “criticize the government’s policies.” The study found that most Internet users are young, about 60% male, and tend to use the Internet not to engage in politics, but for entertainment, such as games, music, and chat. Guo theorized that this could reflect a growing trend towards political apathy among Chinese youth.

Study respondents seemed unconcerned about the government’s control; in fact, most users considered the control of online information necessary. “The question is not how much the content is controlled by the government,” Guo explained, “but how much the content is needed by Internet users.” When China blocked the search engine Google, for example, an uproar ensued that made the government back down, suggesting that the value of the content blocked is more important to users than whether or not the government engages in blocking. There is no similar outcry when sites posted by democracy activists are shut down, for example. Incidents such as this prompted Guo to muse, “One wonders, who is the cat and who is the mouse?”