Journalism.co.uk: Dungeons and Dragons

March 4, 2004

In January 2001, Dong Yanhong was detained for 'publishing subversive information on the internet'. The 32-year-old university worker from Beijing was imprisoned for five years.

Most people would guess she is a pro-democracy or human rights campaigner or a member of a banned political group. Five-year sentences for those alleged crimes in China are not unusual. But the Chinese authorities have not accused Dong Yanhong of any of these things. Instead, her crime was to disseminate information about the meditation system practised by the spiritual movement Falun Gong.

The persecution of the Falun Gong typifies government attempts to both gag the internet and use it as a tool to crack down on groups and individuals that it perceives as a threat.

Amnesty International reports that five other Falun Gong practitioners were secretly tried along with Dong Yanhong. All of them were arrested for downloading material about the exercise and meditation system increasingly described as a spiritual movement.

One was beaten while in custody and two were given sentences of more than 10 years.

Since Falun Gong was banned in 1999 [...], Amnesty has reported that tens of thousands of its practitioners have been detained - some in psychiatric hospitals. Most have been sent to labour camps without trial while it is estimated that hundreds have died in custody.

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Erasing Falun Gong from the internet is key to the government's strategy to confront the movement -- estimated to have 70 million followers in China in 1999. Websites have been closed and followers identified through internet surveillance. Last month saw five more Falun Gong followers imprisoned for posting news to an internet site on the torture of a student practitioner. Commenting on this case, international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said: "The five internet users were convicted for posting online what is already very well-known to human rights organisations, that [practitioners] of Falun Gong are systematically tortured in prison".

Chinese efforts to stifle Falun Gong may have extended beyond its own borders. The French Falun Dafa Association is sueing the French authorities for detaining practitioners during an official state visit to France by the secretary general of the communist party Hu Jintao. The French Association says the authorities in France singled out Falun Gong practitioners under pressure from the Chinese Government. Practitioners in the UK have been prevented from even travelling to protest at other Chinese state visits in Europe.

Falun Gong UK spokesman Peter Jauhal told dotJournalism that UK's Falun Gong (www.falungong.org.uk) site has been hacked and attacked several times and the source of these assaults traced to China. He suspects the Chinese authorities are to blame.

Targets for internet censorship extend far beyond the Falun Gong, however. As the number of internet users has rocketed to nearly 80 million, the government has introduced increasingly sophisticated ways to improve surveillance and restrict access only to approved sites.

Amnesty International is aware of 54 people who have been detained or imprisoned for disseminating their beliefs via the internet but it says this is likely to be a fraction of the total.

An unknown number have been imprisoned for using the internet to post information about the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Last year the Chinese News Agency said that more than 100 people had been arrested for posting information about SARS. Although Amnesty cannot access information about most of these people, it has reported that two of them were sentenced to three years' imprisonment for spreading 'rumours' about the virus.

China's methods for preventing the reporting or open discussion about the SARS outbreak included blocking websites that included the term. In the absence of any official information or advice about the outbreak, it was reported that internet use in China mushroomed by 40 per cent in the clamour for news.

In a report published in January -- 'Controls tighten as Internet activism grows' (http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa170012004) - Amnesty detailed some of the methods used by the Chinese authorities to gag the internet. Direct censorship includes the blocking of sites and filtering of information on others. In one study carried out in 2002 by Harvard Law School, more than 50,000 sites out of a total of 204,000 tested were inaccessible from at least one location in the country. Websites banned include the terms 'Taiwan', 'Falun Gong', 'democracy' and 'human rights'.

Recently the authorities have delegated responsibility for censorship to internet cafés and news portals. In October 2003 the authorities announced that all 110,000 internet cafés would have to install surveillance software that can be standardised. RSF cites Liu Qiang, a senior ministry of culture official, as stating that this software will make it possible to collect personal information on internet users and store a record of websites they visit.

RSF has condemned new directives to portals such as sohu.com, netease.com and sina.com. These directives increase the censorship of discussion forums.

In May last year RSF published its report 'Living Dangerously on the Net'. This detailed how state and privately owned news sites 'have set up arrays of filters that enable them to systematically screen out messages containing words banned by the authorities'. Teams of security personnel have been established to use the internet as a means of surveillance. It is estimated that around 30,000 people are employed in this security apparatus.

Amnesty reports that 30 news and information providers have been made to sign a 'self-discipline pledge' to prevent the transmission of 'harmful' information.

One of the most explosive issues linked to state censorship of the internet in China is the allegation that leading Western companies are contributing to the problem through the sale of technology that is used in surveillance and censorship.

China's internet market is likely to become the largest in the world by 2006 and Amnesty reports that investment and involvement of foreign companies in China's telecommunications industry have soared as a result. But the group says the pursuit of lucrative deals 'may be indirectly contributing to human rights violations or at the very least failing to give adequate consideration to the human rights implications of their investments'.

In December last year, RSF wrote to the CEOs of 14 leading companies supplying computer and internet equipment to China calling on them to take a stand against the government's repression of the internet. It said all of them should 'feel responsible for the plight of China's embattled internet users'.

In its report on the state control of the internet published in November 2002, Amnesty said that Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense and Sun Microsystems had provided technology which has been used 'to censor and control the use of the internet in China'.

Responding to these allegations, Cisco Systems has said it is politically neutral and Microsoft has said it cannot control how its technology is used. In its latest report, however, Amnesty has branded these responses as 'inadequate'. It claims the companies may be violating the UN Human Rights Norms for Business which states that multinational companies should seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights.

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