By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, September 17 1996; Page A09

The Washington Post

BEIJING, Sept. 16 -- Two weeks ago, a Chinese student posted a message on one of the computer bulletin boards that link more than 200 Chinese universities, and the reverberations have not stopped yet.

The student called for a demonstration on Sept. 18 at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing to protest Japanese actions concerning five tiny East China Sea islands, the Diaoyu Islands, possession of which is disputed by China, Japan and Taiwan.

Messages then spread by word of mouth with computer speed; demonstrations have taken place in Hong Kong, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese have signed a petition expressing their outrage. Alarmed, the government banished a leader of the petition drive from Beijing to remote Qinghai Province last weekend, and it warned students that they need permission before they can hold a public demonstration.

Although permission might be needed to protest on Beijing's streets, rules of the road for expressing opinions on the information highway are still being worked out in China.

"The government was shocked by the power of" domestic bulletin boards -- many of which are accessible via the Internet -- and by the outpouring of support for the Diaoyu protest, said one computer analyst here. While the Chinese government shares popular anger about Japan's nationalist attitude toward the Diaoyu Islands, China's leaders do not want ad hoc public demonstrations organized on-line.

The incident spurred government efforts to tighten control of computer communication. Computer technicians have been ordered to monitor the Qinghua University computer bulletin board and delete offensive articles and messages. Anything outside "education and research" -- politics, entertainment or humor -- should be erased. More than a week ago, the Beijing University bulletin board was shut down entirely.

The new moves against computer bulletin boards come just after China's government started blocking access to dozens of foreign World Wide Web sites. Using software that blocks access to specifically designated sites at China's limited number of computer gateways to the Internet, the government kept thousands of Chinese computer users in Beijing from reading web sites run by human rights groups, exiled political dissidents, pornographic magazines, the Taiwan government information office, as well as Western media such as the Voice of America (VOA), The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Cable News Network, among others. A popular discussion forum called China News Digest, run from North America, was also blocked.

The effort to prevent certain foreign material from reaching Chinese citizens has had a considerable effect. Chinese access to VOA's web site has dropped substantially in the past three weeks. Typically, 50 to 150 computers in China downloaded between 400 and 1,000 items from the U.S. government-run web site every week, and those items would be retrieved by many other users once in China. Two weeks ago, however, the numbers dropped to 22 computers downloading 218 items. Last week's numbers were in the same range.

"These figures . . . convince me that something is definitely interfering with access from China," said Chris Kern, a computer expert at VOA.

All companies seeking to market Internet access services in China must transmit all information through one of a handful of computer gateways in and out of the country, such as the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications' Chinanet, or the Ministry of Electronics' Golden Bridge, or the State Education Commission's university-based services. Those computer gateways, also called "routers," typically have software that can check the source and destination of information by examining its numerical "address."

To block a particular web site, the person managing the router need only program the machine not to allow data to or from a specific address. That way, when people connected to the Internet via that computer try to call up the web site, they are told that the computer doesn't recognize the address.

But computer analysts here note that while China can hinder the free flow of information, it cannot stop it completely.

"They can't do it," said Tang Mingfeng, president of International Network Platform, a Beijing computer consulting firm. "They can control several sites that are not friendly or are pornographic. . . . But they can't control the whole thing."

Kern, from VOA, notes that while the Chinese government has hindered access to the VOA web site, it hasn't stopped it altogether. Moreover, Kern said, many other institutions, including foreign universities, copy the contents of the VOA web site and make it available on the Internet through their own sites. That way, even if the government blocks the address of the VOA web site, Chinese can see the information on a different -- and probably uncensored -- site.

"It's like an arms race between the ingenuity of the people trying to impose censorship and those seeking information," said Peter Long, a manager with Cisco Systems Inc., of San Jose, Calif., one of the leading makers of routers.

In addition, the government has not forced everyone managing a gateway to restrict the information retrieved from the Internet. For example, it has not imposed restrictions on people who access the Internet through, one of Beijing's three gateways.

As a result, individuals and network service providers around Beijing said in interviews that they have been able to circumvent the government restrictions.

Even more difficult than blocking foreign sites is restricting the messages and bulletin board postings that originate inside China, such as the ones promoting protests over the Diaoyu Islands. To block such material, the government would have to stall messages in transit and then scan them for key words or phrases that would indicate that they were objectionable.

"A government bent on censorship could put delay in the forwarding of mail and start to look at the content," said Long at Cisco. But if the messages are either written in code or encrypted, such electronic searching programs are useless, he said.

And the volume of on-line material is exploding -- with the government's blessing. The China Educational and Research Network (CERNET) eventually will reach 1,000 universities. A Beijing conference on the Internet last week drew thousands of participants. New companies are vying for permission to be Internet access providers.

Many companies are adding Chinese language software programs and Chinese language data bases, making computer communication even easier for Chinese who do not speak English. Sparkice, a fledgling Canadian-Chinese company, is setting up a Chinese company data base and global Chinese yellow pages. Last week Microsoft launched the Chinese language version of its Internet browsing software Internet Explore 3.0.

Because the Chinese government is trying simultaneously to expand the country's computer network infrastructure and limit the free flow of information, it is particularly attracted to intranets -- networks that principally limit communication to linked users within a certain company or group.

Many companies are happy to help. Sparkice wants to provide service in 10 cities, but its chairman, Edward Zeng, said he would filter out "noncommercial information." A U.S.-trained computer expert, James Chu, has started a Hong Kong-based firm, China Internet Corp., that is working with the government's New China News Agency to set up an intranet for China.

During a June visit to China, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said he expected Internet use in China to grow rapidly, though mostly through intranets and domestically restricted services.

"Every country has some issue about what kind of publishing they want to restrict on the Internet, be it pornography or political statements; lots of governments are wrestling with this," Gates said. "We think that some approach will be found inside companies or inside the country whereby there will be widespread use of the Internet without any difficulties."

New China News Agency has reported that China is expected to have about 120,000 Internet users by the end of this year, and 1 million users by 2000. Gates said about 1.5 million PCs are sold yearly in China, making the country seventh or eighth in the world in sales. He estimated that computer sales in China will grow at a rate of 50 percent a year.

China isn't the only nation trying to censor the Internet. "Every country has some management of the [computer] network and the methods are constantly being updated and changed," Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen Guofang said.

Singapore, which prides itself on being a financial center with efficient services and modern communications, put new regulations into effect last weekend to make it easier for the government to censor what it considers smut and subversive material. Service providers are now required to go through one of the city-state's three computer gateways, where certain web sites can be blocked.

Yet even Singapore's efficiency might not be enough to censor the Internet. One computer expert in Beijing noted that the longer the list of prohibited sites, the slower the service.

Moreover, a paper written last year noted that Singapore's censors were already heavily overworked. The number of censors in the Ministry of Information and the Arts rose from nine in 1983 to 16 in 1993, while the volume of materials they had to examine grew much faster. The workload per censor increased fivefold, from 5,500 pieces in 1978 to more than 25,000 in 1993 -- and that was before the boom in Internet communications.

Staff writer Elizabeth Corcoran in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company

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