Chinese+Internet+Police

=The Myth=

toc Is it true?Are there really over 30 000 Chinese Internet Police scrounging through the myriad trails of the web, looking for illegal activities? According to Michelle Levesque, the answer is no. Although there are people that act as "Internet Police," the number comes nowhere near 30 000.



How It Began
The myth began when a small newspaper said there was an "unconfirmed rumor" that there are 30 000 Chinese Internet Police. Even then, the newspaper treated the rumor as unlikely to be true. Later, a more noteworthy newspaper stated that there was a "rumor" that there are 30 000 Chinese Internet Police. Eventually, the word "rumor" turned into "reportedly" followed by "are" and finally "more than 50 000" in the March 2005 New York Times. Thus, the rumor became a fact.

Self-Surveillance
This large, incorrect number has not been corrected. The thought of 50 000 Chinese Internet Police encourages Internet users to perform self-surveillance. In other words, their belief of the possibility that someone could be watching them regulates their activities online. This is related to the theory of Panopticism.

=The Correction Of The Myth=

Even though according to Michelle Levesque that the number of the Chinese internet police comes nowhere near 30 000, it is easily to be proven to be wrong. By simply type in 网络警察(internet police), you can easily find out that almost every city in China has a branch of internet police. They have their own websites, so it is very easy to check if they are real internet police or just imagined figures. People who can not read Chinese can go on this web page and see all the domain names, such as the [|Suzhou Cyberpolice net], and the [|Zhengzhou Net Police].

Also, recently the news about “Beijing are recruiting and training nearly 4 000 internet police to monitor activities at internet cafes and related companies” can be found on several large newspapers. Hence, it would not be a surprise to know that there are over 30,000 internet police all over China, since Beijing alone are expecting 4,000 more this year.

=See Also= [|CHINA: Search on for 4,000 web police]

=Chinese Internet Police=

Within the People's Republic of China, there is heavy government involvement in the media. As one of the newest forms of the media, the internet is also being strongly governmentally censored. More than 100 million people in China now have Internet access and the figure is notably growing every second. Hence, it is especially difficult yet important for the State to limit Internet use.

Since the beginning of 1996, the State has put all existing Internet services under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Ministry of Electronics Industry, and the State Education Commission. Also, the government has made laws to maintain its absolute control over the use of the internet. Internet police is a newly established job position that deals with any attempts to overthrow the government, online websites that contain pornography or “dangerous” and “unhealthy” information.

"Jingjing" and "Chacha" (Jing Cha = Police), two cartoon figures which represent Shenzhen Internet Police will officially be online starting on January 22, 2006. From then on, when users visit websites and web forums of Shenzhen, they will see these two cartoon police images floating on their screen. It is no surprise that the Internet police has existed for a long time. The purpose of the publishing of these two images is to develop self censorship, so all internet users know that the Internet is not a place beyond of law, and every movement conducted is under the control of the government.

On one of the most popular Chinese website, Tencent website, the image of "Jingjing" a male police officer, with its domain name: http://66110.qzone.qq.com and Chacha a female officer, with the domain name http://777110.qzone.qq.com are displayed. People can also use [|QQ] (one form of instant communication tool like msn) to communicate with the two Cartoon police interactively.

The designer of the two cartoon images, The Internet Security and Surveillance Division of Shenzhen Public Security Bureau hopes that the appearance of Jingjing and Chacha would remind people to be conscious of safe and healthy use of the Internet, self-regulate their online behavior, and maintain harmonious Internet order.

=Internet Censorship in Mainland China=

The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China has passed an Internet censorship law in mainland China. The project is known as Golden Shield which applies to all provinces and cities in the Chinese territory Hong Kong and Macau, for they have their own legal systems.

Great Firewall of China (in reference both to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China) is a significant part of this huge project which blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall. Also, while using QQ in mainland China, attempting to send a message containing the name of [|Falun Gong], an anti-government religion, results in a "server timeout" error.  =Examples=

Foreign Sites
Research into the mainland Chinese Internet censorship has shown that blocked websites include: News from many foreign sources, especially websites which include forums. BBC News, Hong Kong News sources are heavily censored. Websites, news and information about Tibetan independence, [|Falun Gong], Dalai Lama, Taiwan and Taiwan independence, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, pornography, religious websites, sites critical of top Chinese leaders or those expressing views different from the Chinese government are being blocked. 

Search engines
Search engines include both international ones (e.g. Yahoo! and Google) as well as domestic ones (e.g. Baidu) are forced to disallow certain terms from being used on search engines. Attempting to search for such a term results in a “The page cannot be displayed error.” Repeatedly attempting to search for blocked terms results in the entire search engine being blocked, presumably from the same IP address.

Hence, if a term is blocked, then any related phrase containing the term is also blocked. For example, since falun, or "Law wheel" is blocked, so are [|Falun Gong] and "Turning the Law wheel".

Huang Qi, owner and webmaster of the Internet site www.tianwang.com, has been imprisoned since June 2000 and his trial ended in August 2001

=Big Mama=

Although the government does not have necessarily have the physical power to monitor all Internet chat rooms and forums, the threat of being shut down has caused internet content providers to employ internal staff, commonly known as "big mamas”. "Big mama" refers to a Chinese internet censor who sponsors the bulletin board and take down politically sensitive postings. In Chinese the name is directly translated as “aunt”, the wife of the eldest uncle, who in the traditional Chinese family has to take care of everyone. Big mamas act quite openly, and are not at all reluctant to admit that they are censoring and why.

While some people argued that the right of free expression is violated because Big Mamas helped the government to control the content on BBS, others have pointed out that by allowing web discussion sites to exist in the first place, the system actually promotes freedom of expression. Furthermore, they think it is much better to have Big Mamas to perform the censorship than to have officials of the Chinese government review all of the content on the message boards. Big mamas would not make any effort to track down posters and punish them, they only edit and delete “unwanted phrases.”

=External Links=


 * 1) [|Let Us See What The Chinese Internet Police Do Each Day]-a translated article describing one day in the life of a Chinese internet police officer
 * 2) [|Chinese Internet Police]-Chinese Internet Police-Anhui Province's new internet police
 * 3) [|China Defends Right to Police Internet]-China Defends Right to Police Internet -new movement in China regarding internet police
 * 4) [|The Development and the State Control of the Chinese Internet]-The Development and the State Control of the Chinese Internet-Berkeley China Internet Project, focused on state censorship and the use of interactive media
 * 5) [|Yahoo may have helped jail another Chinese user]-Yahoo may have helped jail another Chinese user-recent news about Yahoo provided a user's ID who was jailed
 * 6) [|Internet police state]-Internet police state-cartoon icons created to censor over Chinese web users
 * 7) [|The Case of Huang Qi]-The Case of Huang Qi-Huang Qi was formally charged with "instigating subversion of state power," caught by the internet police
 * 8) [|Chinese Internet related laws]
 * 9) [|China's 'Big Mamas' in a Quandary]- is an article based on the power of the internet to urge and at the same time repress the issue of the chinese internet police
 * 10) [|China shut 8600 internet cafes in 3 months]- "breaking news"

=Works Cited=

1. Hong Yan, //[|Image of Internet Police: Jingjing and Chacha online],// accessed on February 21, 2006 2. Levesque, Michelle. "Surveillance and Information Control." CCT205H5 Guest Lecture 6. University of Toronto at Mississauga and Sheridan Institute. Sheridan Institute, Oakville. 7 February 2006. 3. [|Wikipedia: Internet Censorship in China] 4. [|Wikipedia: Media in China]

Images

1. Image of [|Huang Qi] 2. Image of [|Jingjing] and [|Chacha] 3. Image of [|Chinese Internet Police]