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China tightens its grip on the Internet

Online freedoms in Hong Kong could be at risk
China tightens its grip on the Internet

Policemen walk through an exhibition at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, in China's Zhejiang province, in this November 2014 photo. Rights watchdogs say China has expanded its controls over the Internet. (Johannes Eisele/AFP)

Published: October 29, 2015 11:13 AM GMT
Updated: October 29, 2015 12:30 AM GMT

China has further tightened control of the Internet, developing new cyber weapons to attack enemies while extending prison terms for those who violate loosely defined rules, U.S.-based Freedom House said in a new report.

The world's most populous country, with 640 million Internet users, ranked last out of 65 countries, as the report warned China was also starting to drag down Hong Kong's online freedoms.

"Over the past year, the renewed emphasis on information control led to acts of unconcealed aggression against Internet freedom," stated the Freedom House report, released Oct. 28.

"As in past years, although pressure on overseas websites and companies increased, the real targets of repression were domestic Internet users."

China continued to add to its long list of banned websites over the past year. Facebook and Twitter continued to be blocked, so too religious sites including the ucanews.com Chinese language homepage. In March, China added to its growing list of banned overseas news websites in blocking access to Reuters.

In January, authorities reportedly upgraded the "Great Firewall" that filters all traffic in and out of China amid a drive toward "cyberspace sovereignty" under President Xi Jinping. This followed a total block against Google sites six months earlier, around the 25-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 2014.

"Xi Jinping is hell-bent on full control of the Internet and since June of last year has taken a really heavy-handed approach," said Charlie Smith, an alias for a co-founder of GreatFire.org, which monitors online censorship in China.

Chinese Internet users have gotten more creative circumventing restrictions, he added. But in the battle over what is and is not allowed online in China, the state has continued to add new targets to block and punish wayward netizens.

Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, remain one of the few tools that can bypass Internet blocks in China by linking through servers overseas. However, a growing number have reported users in China experiencing problems accessing their sites and downloading apps to access banned sites.

In a bid to offer access to blocked sites, Greatfire.org pioneered a technique called "collateral freedom" offering mirror sites on the servers of Internet giants like Amazon in the hope China's authorities would consider them too big to block.

However, in April, China appeared to unleash a new online weapon dubbed "the Great Cannon," which used the Chinese search engine Baidu.com to direct ordinary traffic onto servers hosting mirror sites, causing them to overload.

 

Total blackout

On Chinese social media, users enjoyed wider scope to post information contrary to the Communist Party discourse. But authorities continued to devise new ways to restrict free discussion.

Sites including the microblogging service Weibo have been used extensively in recent months to post updates on China's growing religious persecution, particularly in Zhejiang province, where a cross-removal campaign has seen authorities remove 1,500 church crosses since March 2013.

Many Chinese remain ignorant of the campaign amid a near total blackout in the state-dominated mainstream media. However, many users have posted pictures of removed crosses and Christian campaigns to oppose authorities in Zhejiang.

In a bid to pressure social media users, authorities have launched a campaign requiring users on Wechat and Weibo to register their true identities. From Nov. 1, those spreading "rumors" online will face a longer maximum prison term of up to seven years, state media reported this week.

China is also working on a new system, which has received scant attention in the media, combining the online behavior, financial history and criminal record of every one of China's more than 1.3 billion citizens to create a "citizen score" by 2020. This will then help determine promotions and even bank loans.

In July, China passed a wide-ranging National Security Law giving further legal weight to authorities to make the Internet "secure and controllable."

Freedom House warned that Beijing's designs on controlling the Internet were extending to Hong Kong, where authorities cut online ties with the mainland during pro-democracy protests at the end of last year.

"Hong Kong is still relatively free on the Internet under the 'One Country, Two Systems' principle," said Law Yuk-kai, director of Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor.

"But the concept of China's National Security Law that took effect on July 1 may affect the stance of the local government."

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