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Perspectives Chinese People Can Say (Almost)
What They Please on the Net August 11, 1999 Xiong Chengyu, a top advisor to the Chinese government on the Internet, has a message for anyone who thinks Beijing may one day attempt to massively censor or even disable the Internet in China: "There's no way," he said. "No one can kill the Internet. Not China, not the U.S., no one." Dr. Xiong, a professor of communication who teaches 'The Internet and Chinese Society' at Beijing's Tsinghua University, said the enormous range of traditional media that now flourishes in China is a clear signal the government will tolerate a similarly wide range of expression on the net. "You can get almost any kind of information you want," Dr. Xiong said. "It runs the gamut from the Renmin Ribao (People's Daily) to the Qing Nian Bao (China Youth Daily) with everything in between." The Renmin Ribao is the staid official party newspaper, and the Qing Nian Bao a lively paper with a full Western-style tabloid quotient of scandal stories, celebrity profiles, hard-hitting investigations, and a touch of cheesecake. Yet if the Chinese media has come a long way in recent years, there is still one form of expression Beijing will not tolerate in the slightest: a challenge to the Communist Party. Indeed, politics in any form as a subject for discussion in the Chinese media is still a deeply iffy proposition. Acknowledging that, Dr. Xiong predicts some major test cases lie ahead for Beijing. Take the matter of personal web pages. For the past three years, e-mail, search engines, and chat groups have been the most popular Internet applications in China. Now, however, more and more Chinese websurfers are discovering that with the help of Chinese-language portals like www.netease.com they can create their own home pages. "A website is something like publishing, and I don't know whether that's legal," Dr. Xiong said. "For books and newspapers, content is often controlled to decide if it is good for people or not. There is some law there. But with websites, we're still waiting for the law to be written." Another web frontier requiring careful attention, Dr. Xiong said, was cyber warfare. He had read reports that the United States is already carrying out cyberwarfare against Saddam Hussein. And last week, the Liberation Daily newspaper of the People's Liberation Army ran an editorial supporting the idea of training "cyberwarriors" to defend China's computers from foreign attacks - or who could launch attacks against enemies if need be. "Both governments need to think seriously about this issue," Dr. Xiong said. Still, though, Dr. Xiong said, cyberwarfare is probably a lesser threat than the risk that the Internet will open a high pressure hose flooding Chinese culture with the English language, Western perspectives, and pop icons. "Every country has its traditions, and we need to keep ours," Dr. Xiong said. "We also want to share our ideas with the world outside of China. Yet so much of the communication is going only one way, today. It's only coming from the rich countries to us. If that's all that happens, both sides lose." |
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