[tt] Atlantic: James Fallows: The Connection Has Been Reset

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James Fallows: The Connection Has Been Reset
March 2008 Atlantic Monthly
[Linked by Arts and Letters Daily. Sorry about dropped URLs. Interview 
with the author appended.]

China's Great Firewall is crude, slapdash, and surprisingly easy to
breach. Here's why it's so effective anyway.

by James Fallows

Many foreigners who come to China for the Olympics will use the
Internet to tell people back home what they have seen and to check
what else has happened in the world.

James Fallows explains how he was able to probe the taboo subject of
Chinese Internet censorship.

The first thing they'll probably notice is that China's Internet
seems slow. Partly this is because of congestion in China's internal
networks, which affects domestic and international transmissions
alike. Partly it is because even electrons take a detectable period
of time to travel beneath the Pacific Ocean to servers in America
and back again; the trip to and from Europe is even longer, because
that goes through America, too. And partly it is because of the
delaying cycles imposed by China's system that monitors what people
are looking for on the Internet, especially when they're looking
overseas. That's what foreigners have heard about.

They'll likely be surprised, then, to notice that China's Internet
seems surprisingly free and uncontrolled. Can they search for
information about "Tibet independence" or "Tiananmen shooting" or
other terms they have heard are taboo? Probably--and they'll be able
to click right through to the controversial sites. Even if they
enter the Chinese-language term for "democracy in China," they'll
probably get results. What about Wikipedia, famously off-limits to
users in China? They will probably be able to reach it. Naturally
the visitors will wonder: What's all this I've heard about the
"Great Firewall" and China's tight limits on the Internet?

In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not
the absence of China's electronic control but its new
refinement--and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will
be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay.
According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations
in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet
have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of
specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses--certain Internet cafés,
access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners
are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. (I am not
giving names or identifying details of any Chinese citizens with
whom I have discussed this topic, because they risk financial or
criminal punishment for criticizing the system or even disclosing
how it works. Also, I have not gone to Chinese government agencies
for their side of the story, because the very existence of Internet
controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague
statements about the importance of keeping online information
"wholesome.")

Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government's attempt to
rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well
crafted. When American technologists write about the control system,
they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss
it--at least with me--they tend to emphasize its strength. All of
them are right, which makes the government's approach to the
Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people's
daily lives.

Disappointingly, "Great Firewall" is not really the right term for
the Chinese government's overall control strategy. China has indeed
erected a firewall--a barrier to keep its Internet users from
dealing easily with the outside world--but that is only one part of
a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. The
official name for the entire approach, which is ostensibly a way to
keep hackers and other rogue elements from harming Chinese Internet
users, is the "Golden Shield Project." Since that term is too creepy
to bear repeating, I'll use "the control system" for the overall
strategy, which includes the "Great Firewall of China," or GFW, as
the means of screening contact with other countries.

In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke
points, so that each packet of information could be routed quickly
around any temporary obstruction. In China, the Internet came with
choke points built in. Even now, virtually all Internet contact
between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very
small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of
three points: the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north, where
cables come in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, where they
also come from Japan; and Guangzhou in the south, where they come
from Hong Kong. (A few places in China have Internet service via
satellite, but that is both expensive and slow. Other lines run
across Central Asia to Russia but carry little traffic.) In late
2006, Internet users in China were reminded just how important these
choke points are when a seabed earthquake near Taiwan cut some major
cables serving the country. It took months before international
transmissions to and from most of China regained even their
pre-quake speed, such as it was.

Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be
harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic
into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of
these few "international gateways" a device called a "tapper" or
"network sniffer," which can mirror every packet of data going in or
out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal
sense. "Mirroring" is the term for normal copying or backup
operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are
employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little
pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway
routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a
separate set of "Golden Shield" computers.Here the term's creepiness
is appropriate. As the other routers and servers (short for file
servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that
make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where it's
supposed to go, China's own surveillance computers are looking over
the same information to see whether it should be stopped.

The mirroring routers were first designed and supplied to the
Chinese authorities by the U.S. tech firm Cisco, which is why Cisco
took such heat from human-rights organizations. Cisco has always
denied that it tailored its equipment to the authorities'
surveillance needs, and said it merely sold them what it would sell
anyone else. The issue is now moot, since similar routers are made
by companies around the world, notably including China's own
electronics giant, Huawei. The ongoing refinements are mainly in
surveillance software, which the Chinese are developing themselves.
Many of the surveillance engineers are thought to come from the
military's own technology institutions. Their work is good and
getting better, I was told by Chinese and foreign engineers who do
"oppo research" on the evolving GFW so as to design better ways to
get around it.

Andrew Lih, a former journalism professor and software engineer now
based in Beijing (and author of the forthcoming book The Wikipedia
Story), laid out for me the ways in which the GFW can keep a Chinese
Internet user from finding desired material on a foreign site. In
the few seconds after a user enters a request at the browser, and
before something new shows up on the screen, at least four things
can go wrong--or be made to go wrong.

The first and bluntest is the "DNS block." The DNS, or Domain Name
System, is in effect the telephone directory of Internet sites. Each
time you enter a Web address, or URL--www.yahoo.com, let's say--the
DNS looks up the IP address where the site can be found. IP
addresses are numbers separated by dots--for example,
TheAtlantic.com's is 38.118.42.200. If the DNS is instructed to give
back no address, or a bad address, the user can't reach the site in
question--as a phone user could not make a call if given a bad
number. Typing in the URL for the BBC's main news site often gets
the no-address treatment: if you try news.bbc.co.uk, you may get a
"Site not found" message on the screen. For two months in 2002,
Google's Chinese site, Google.cn, got a different kind of
bad-address treatment, which shunted users to its main competitor,
the dominant Chinese search engine, Baidu. Chinese academics
complained that this was hampering their work. The government, which
does not have to stand for reelection but still tries not to
antagonize important groups needlessly, let Google.cn back online.
During politically sensitive times, like last fall's 17th Communist
Party Congress, many foreign sites have been temporarily shut down
this way.

Next is the perilous "connect" phase. If the DNS has looked up and
provided the right IP address, your computer sends a signal
requesting a connection with that remote site. While your signal is
going out, and as the other system is sending a reply, the
surveillance computers within China are looking over your request,
which has been mirrored to them. They quickly check a list of
forbidden IP sites. If you're trying to reach one on that blacklist,
the Chinese international-gateway servers will interrupt the
transmission by sending an Internet "Reset" command both to your
computer and to the one you're trying to reach. Reset is a perfectly
routine Internet function, which is used to repair connections that
have become unsynchronized. But in this case it's equivalent to
forcing the phones on each end of a conversation to hang up. Instead
of the site you want, you usually see an onscreen message beginning
"The connection has been reset"; sometimes instead you get "Site not
found." Annoyingly, blogs hosted by the popular system Blogspot are
on this IP blacklist. For a typical Google-type search, many of the
links shown on the results page are from Wikipedia or one of these
main blog sites. You will see these links when you search from
inside China, but if you click on them, you won't get what you want.

The third barrier comes with what Lih calls "URL keyword block." The
numerical Internet address you are trying to reach might not be on
the blacklist. But if the words in its URL include forbidden terms,
the connection will also be reset. (The Uniform Resource Locator is
a site's address in plain English--say, www.microsoft.com--rather
than its all-numeric IP address.) The site FalunGong .com appears to
have no active content, but even if it did, Internet users in China
would not be able to see it. The forbidden list contains words in
English, Chinese, and other languages, and is frequently
revised--"like, with the name of the latest town with a coal mine
disaster," as Lih put it. Here the GFW's programming technique is
not a reset command but a "black-hole loop," in which a request for
a page is trapped in a sequence of delaying commands. These are the
programming equivalent of the old saw about how to keep an idiot
busy: you take a piece of paper and write "Please turn over" on each
side. When the Firefox browser detects that it is in this kind of
loop, it gives an error message saying: "The server is redirecting
the request for this address in a way that will never complete."

The final step involves the newest and most sophisticated part of
the GFW: scanning the actual contents of each page--which stories
The New York Times is featuring, what a China-related blog carries
in its latest update--to judge its page-by-page acceptability. This
again is done with mirrors. When you reach a favorite blog or news
site and ask to see particular items, the requested pages come to
you--and to the surveillance system at the same time. The GFW
scanner checks the content of each item against its list of
forbidden terms. If it finds something it doesn't like, it breaks
the connection to the offending site and won't let you download
anything further from it. The GFW then imposes a temporary blackout
on further "IP1 to IP2" attempts--that is, efforts to establish
communications between the user and the offending site. Usually the
first time-out is for two minutes. If the user tries to reach the
site during that time, a five-minute time-out might begin. On a
third try, the time-out might be 30 minutes or an hour--and so on
through an escalating sequence of punishments.

Users who try hard enough or often enough to reach the wrong sites
might attract the attention of the authorities. At least in
principle, Chinese Internet users must sign in with their real names
whenever they go online, even in Internet cafés. When the
surveillance system flags an IP address from which a lot of "bad"
searches originate, the authorities have a good chance of knowing
who is sitting at that machine.

All of this adds a note of unpredictability to each attempt to get
news from outside China. One day you go to the NPR site and cruise
around with no problem. The next time, NPR happens to have done a
feature on Tibet. The GFW immobilizes the site. If you try to
refresh the page or click through to a new story, you'll get
nothing--and the time-out clock will start.

This approach is considered a subtler and more refined form of
censorship, since big foreign sites no longer need be blocked
wholesale. In principle they're in trouble only when they cover the
wrong things. Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese media at the
University of California at Berkeley journalism school, told me that
the authorities have recently begun applying this kind of filtering
in reverse. As Chinese-speaking people outside the country, perhaps
academics or exiled dissidents, look for data on Chinese sites--say,
public-health figures or news about a local protest--the GFW
computers can monitor what they're asking for and censor what they
find.

Taken together, the components of the control system share several
traits. They're constantly evolving and changing in their emphasis,
as new surveillance techniques become practical and as words go on
and off the sensitive list. They leave the Chinese Internet public
unsure about where the off-limits line will be drawn on any given
day. Andrew Lih points out that other countries that also censor
Internet content--Singapore, for instance, or the United Arab
Emirates--provide explanations whenever they do so. Someone who
clicks on a pornographic or "anti-Islamic" site in the U.A.E. gets
the following message, in Arabic and English: "We apologize the site
you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content
being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and
moral values of the United Arab Emirates." In China, the connection
just times out. Is it your computer's problem? The firewall? Or
maybe your local Internet provider, which has decided to do some
filtering on its own? You don't know. "The unpredictability of the
firewall actually makes it more effective," another Chinese software
engineer told me. "It becomes much harder to know what the system is
looking for, and you always have to be on guard."

There is one more similarity among the components of the firewall:
they are all easy to thwart.

As a practical matter, anyone in China who wants to get around the
firewall can choose between two well-known and dependable
alternatives: the proxy server and the VPN. A proxy server is a way
of connecting your computer inside China with another one somewhere
else--or usually to a series of foreign computers, automatically
passing signals along to conceal where they really came from. You
initiate a Web request, and the proxy system takes over, sending it
to a computer in America or Finland or Brazil. Eventually the system
finds what you want and sends it back. The main drawback is that it
makes Internet operations very, very slow. But because most proxies
cost nothing to install and operate, this is the favorite of
students and hackers in China.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a faster, fancier, and more
elegant way to achieve the same result. Essentially a VPN creates
your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal
Internet. From within China, a VPN connects you with an Internet
server somewhere else. You pass your browsing and downloading
requests to that American or Finnish or Japanese server, and it
finds and sends back what you're looking for. The GFW doesn't stop
you, because it can't read the encrypted messages you're sending.
Every foreign business operating in China uses such a network. VPNs
are freely advertised in China, so individuals can sign up, too. I
use one that costs $40 per year. (An expat in China thinks: that's a
little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: it's a
week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days'
work.)

As a technical matter, China could crack down on the proxies and
VPNs whenever it pleased. Today the policy is: if a message comes
through that the surveillance system cannot read because it's
encrypted, let's wave it on through! Obviously the system's behavior
could be reversed. But everyone I spoke with said that China could
simply not afford to crack down that way. "Every bank, every foreign
manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs
VPNs to exist," a Chinese professor told me. "They would have to
shut down the next day if asked to send their commercial information
through the regular Chinese Internet and the Great Firewall."
Closing down the free, easy-to-use proxy servers would create a
milder version of the same problem. Encrypted e-mail, too, passes
through the GFW without scrutiny, and users of many Web-based mail
systems can establish a secure session simply by typing "https:"
rather than the usual "http:" in a site's address--for instance,
https://mail.yahoo.com. To keep China in business, then, the
government has to allow some exceptions to its control efforts--even
knowing that many Chinese citizens will exploit the resulting
loopholes.

Because the Chinese government can't plug every gap in the Great
Firewall, many American observers have concluded that its larger
efforts to control electronic discussion, and the democratization
and grass-roots organizing it might nurture, are ultimately doomed.
A recent item on an influential American tech Web site had the
headline "Chinese National Firewall Isn't All That Effective." In
October, Wired ran a story under the headline "The Great Firewall:
China's Misguided--and Futile--Attempt to Control What Happens
Online."

Let's not stop to discuss why the vision of
democracy-through-communications-technology is so convincing to so
many Americans. (Samizdat, fax machines, and the Voice of America
eventually helped bring down the Soviet system. Therefore proxy
servers and online chat rooms must erode the power of the Chinese
state. Right?) Instead, let me emphasize how unconvincing this
vision is to most people who deal with China's system of extensive,
if imperfect, Internet controls.

Think again of the real importance of the Great Firewall. Does the
Chinese government really care if a citizen can look up the
Tiananmen Square entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. Anyone who wants
that information will get it--by using a proxy server or VPN, by
e-mailing to a friend overseas, even by looking at the surprisingly
broad array of foreign magazines that arrive, uncensored, in Chinese
public libraries.

What the government cares about is making the quest for information
just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most
Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their
own country. All around them is more information about China and
things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are
bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores
are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public
libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of
TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and
about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available
inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or
incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous
mirrors that help build the Great Firewall--these and other modern
achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and
pre-technological reason. By making the search for external
information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an
environment in which familiar tools of social control come into
play.

Chinese bloggers have learned that if they want to be read in China,
they must operate within China, on the same side of the firewall as
their potential audience. Sure, they could put up exactly the same
information outside the Chinese mainland. But according to Rebecca
MacKinnon, a former Beijing correspondent for CNN now at the
Journalism and Media Studies Center of the University of Hong Kong,
their readers won't make the effort to cross the GFW and find them.
"If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China,"
she told me. And being inside China means operating under the
sweeping rules that govern all forms of media here: guidance from
the authorities; the threat of financial ruin or time in jail; the
unavoidable self-censorship as the cost of defiance sinks in.

Most blogs in China are hosted by big Internet companies. Those
companies know that the government will hold them responsible if a
blogger says something bad. Thus the companies, for their own
survival, are dragooned into service as auxiliary censors.

Large teams of paid government censors delete offensive comments and
warn errant bloggers. (No official figures are available, but the
censor workforce is widely assumed to number in the tens of
thousands.) Members of the public at large are encouraged to speak
up when they see subversive material. The propaganda ministries send
out frequent instructions about what can and cannot be discussed. In
October, the group Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris,
released an astonishing report by a Chinese Internet technician
writing under the pseudonym "Mr. Tao." He collected dozens of the
messages he and other Internet operators had received from the
central government. Here is just one, from the summer of 2006:

   17 June 2006, 18:35
   From: Chen Hua, deputy director of the Beijing Internet
   Information Administrative Bureau
   Dear colleagues, the Internet has of late been full of articles
   and messages about the death of a Shenzhen engineer, Hu Xinyu, as
   a result of overwork. All sites must stop posting articles on
   this subject, those that have already been posted about it must
   be removed from the site and, finally, forums and blogs must
   withdraw all articles and messages about this case.

"Domestic censorship is the real issue, and it is about social
control, human surveillance, peer pressure, and self-censorship,"
Xiao Qiang of Berkeley says. Last fall, a team of computer
scientists from the University of California at Davis and the
University of New Mexico published an exhaustive technical analysis
of the GFW's operation and of the ways it could be foiled. But they
stressed a nontechnical factor: "The presence of censorship, even if
easy to evade, promotes self-censorship."

It would be wrong to portray China as a tightly buttoned
mind-control state. It is too wide-open in too many ways for that.
"Most people in China feel freer than any Chinese people have been
in the country's history, ever," a Chinese software engineer who
earned a doctorate in the United States told me. "There has never
been a space for any kind of discussion before, and the government
is clever about continuing to expand space for anything that doesn't
threaten its survival." But it would also be wrong to ignore the
cumulative effect of topics people are not allowed to discuss.
"Whether or not Americans supported George W. Bush, they could not
avoid learning about Abu Ghraib," Rebecca MacKinnon says. In China,
"the controls mean that whole topics inconvenient for the regime
simply don't exist in public discussion." Most Chinese people remain
wholly unaware of internationally noticed issues like, for instance,
the controversy over the Three Gorges Dam.

Countless questions about today's China boil down to: How long can
this go on? How long can the industrial growth continue before the
natural environment is destroyed? How long can the super-rich get
richer, without the poor getting mad? And so on through a familiar
list. The Great Firewall poses the question in another form: How
long can the regime control what people are allowed to know, without
the people caring enough to object? On current evidence, for quite a
while.

James Fallows is an Atlantic national correspondent; his blog is at
jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.

+++++++++++++

Penetrating the Great Firewall

James Fallows, author of "The Connection Has Been Reset," explains
how he was able to probe the taboo subject of Chinese Internet
censorship.

by Abigail Cutler

Never been to China? Consider taking a trip this summer. The country
is bound to be on its best behavior.

Gone will be most of the amusing "Chinglish" signage made famous by
foreign residents and guidebooks. (To the chagrin of many
English-speakers, the "Dongda Hospital for Anus and Intestine
Disease in Beijing" was recently corrected to read "Hospital of
Proctology.") Taxi drivers will greet their passengers in English.
And beginning in June, the capital city will enforce traffic limits
to cut down on congestion and pollution. Moreover, thanks to a
campaign launched last year that aims to deter line-cutting, Chinese
citizens hoping to score tickets to the Olympic Games in August will
for once wait patiently in a queue with everyone else. Tourists
might even witness a few smogless, "Blue Sky days"--so rare in the
Middle Kingdom that the government counts and publicizes them.

And finally, when visitors log on to surf the Web or e-mail their
impressions of China to loved ones back home, they may be surprised
yet again, because they will be able to access sites like BBC.com,
NYTimes.com, and Wikipedia. Even if they type "Falun Gong" into
Google, they'll likely get results. Indeed, the Internet will seem
so free, writes James Fallows in the March issue of The Atlantic,
that visitors may well wonder, "What's all this I've heard about the
`Great Firewall' and China's tight limits on the Internet?"

Unfortunately, as Fallows explains in his latest article on China,
this technological openness will mostly be a façade, and one
apparent only in a few hand-picked locations (like certain Internet
cafés and high-end hotel rooms) expected to attract foreigners who
are in town for the Olympics. Any loosening of Internet restrictions
this summer will  be not only carefully calculated but also
temporary, intended specifically for visitors and designed to last
only for the duration of their stay.

To an outsider, this dual-track approach--open access through some
channels, limited access through others--might seem overly complex
and, ultimately, self-defeating. As Fallows writes,

   Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government's attempt
   to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and
   well crafted. When American technologists write about the control
   system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens
   discuss it ... they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them
   are right, which makes the government's approach to the Internet
   a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people's daily
   lives.

But with 210 million residents online (only the United States has
more Internet users), how is it possible to maintain such strict
controls over who sees what and when? All Internet communication
between China and the outside world is routed through a very small
number of fiber-optic cables (located near Beijing, Shanghai, and
Guangzhou), Fallows explains, affording the government a rare
opportunity to physically monitor all traffic into or out of the
country. And its capabilities to do so are only improving with time.
Currently, Internet content is blocked one of four ways, and users
who disregard China's Web-surfing etiquette (by searching for
sensitive topics, for example) are punished with temporary
blackouts, or "time-outs."

Paradoxically, the most effective aspect of China's "Golden Shield
Project" is its unpredictability. The system's components are
"constantly evolving and changing in their emphasis," Fallows
writes, "as new surveillance techniques become practical and as
words go on and off of the sensitive list. They leave the Chinese
Internet public unsure about where the off-limits will be drawn on
any given day." This means Internet users must constantly be on
guard in order to avoid trouble. But, with the right technology and
the wherewithal, the Golden Shield is easy to evade.

Good thing, too, because so many of China's banks, foreign
businesses and manufacturing companies, retailers, and software
vendors rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy
servers--the two dependable alternatives to operating within the
Firewall--to survive. "To keep China in business," Fallows writes,
"the government has to allow some exceptions to its control
efforts--even knowing that many Chinese citizens will exploit the
resulting loopholes."

These loopholes prompt an obvious question: What's the point of
maintaining a firewall that's so easy to thwart? The aim, Fallows
notes, is to make it as inconvenient as possible to access
information that could undermine the government. This includes, of
course, details from China's less-than-pristine past--the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, and the Cultural
Revolution--as well as current controversies, like the Three Gorges
Dam project and the country's food-safety issues. (During
politically sensitive times, the government makes accessing
foreign-press Web sites especially difficult.) The result is a user
population conditioned to self-censorship and largely ignorant of
"internationally noticed" issues. One cannot help wondering how much
longer this can this go on.

In his latest report from Beijing, Atlantic national correspondent
James Fallows draws upon both expert reporting and first-hand
experience to explore these questions and others. We communicated by
e-mail in January.

                                                     --Abigail Cutler
        ______________________________________________________

Your story is replete with specific and technical details about how
the Chinese Internet works. How did you gather this information? And
how did you persuade people to talk to you about it?

As a byproduct of my interest in the tech world over the years, I've
met a lot of people who work in a lot of major international
software, hardware, and Internet companies. Through the ones I've
known in America I've met their counterparts in China, and I've
actually visited quite a number of these companies all over
China--hardware manufacturers in the south, software developers in
Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing, and elsewhere, and Internet companies
in several cities.

I made these visits before I knew I would be writing about the
"Great Firewall." Their activities were simply interesting to me, as
proxies for the way China was developing generally. But when I
realized that I wanted to know more about the Great Firewall
situation, I went back to several of these people and said, "Okay,
can you walk me through this and tell me how it works?" As a
condition of our discussion, I told each and every one that I would
not use his or her name. The value that named sources would add to
the story is considerably less than the risk to real people of being
identified in this way.

One software engineer who works for a major international company
made a point that has stuck with me, and that underscores something
Americans don't take seriously enough. If my article were coming out
a few months later, then I would have been able to use her name, she
said. By that point her application for U.S. citizenship would have
come through (she had spent years in the U.S. as a graduate
student). Most Americans don't think very often about what their
citizenship means. It's no accident that every person I quoted in
the story is an American citizen and therefore not really subject to
retribution from Chinese authorities.

You mention early on that you didn't go to the Chinese government
for their side of the story because Internet controls are never
discussed in public. What would have happened if you'd asked the
government about this? Would have put yourself at risk in some way?

The worst risk I would have encountered--I think!--is just being
ignored. Realistically there was zero probability of being granted
an interview with an official of the relevant ministry, and a
less-than-zero chance that he or she would have anything to say
beyond the equivalent of "no comment." In the story, I quote several
observations by Andrew Lih, now of Hong Kong University. Something I
didn't quote from him was a view he obtained from a Chinese official
on this very topic:

"In China, we don't have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes
we have trouble accessing them. But that's a different problem. I
know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from
the Webcast. And I've heard people say that the BBC is not available
in China or that it's blocked. I'm sure I don't know why people say
this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all."

This was from Yang Xiaokun, First Secretary, Permanent Mission of
China to the United Nations Office at Geneva. You see the problem.

The Western press is full of stories about civilians in China (and
reporters in particular) being confronted for their inappropriate
use of the Internet. Have you run into similar problems? Do you find
yourself taking extra precautions when using the Internet?

When living in Shanghai, and now in Beijing, my wife and I have
lived in "serviced apartments" where perhaps many of the residents
are foreigners. In some ways, the Internet services there have been
better than those enjoyed by typical Chinese people. For instance,
after the Christmas earthquake, in 2006, that dramatically affected
connections between most parts of Asia and the rest of the world,
our apartment building in Shanghai was up and running comparatively
quickly because it rented (expensive) satellite connections.

But when it comes to firewalls and other forms of interference,
we've been subject to the same problems as other users within China.
The precautions I've taken have been these: first, I operate through
a VPN (in my case, WiTopia), which as I explain in the story
encrypts transmissions through the Firewall. Second, I rely on Skype
for online chats since those too are safely encrypted. And, although
this probably isn't necessary when I'm using a VPN, when using
webmail I go to secure sites--for instance, https://gmail.com rather
than normal http://, for an extra layer of encryption. As I say,
this is probably overkill. I never use Internet cafés in China--I
can use my Blackberry for e-mail in a pinch.

How does the Chinese search engine Baidu differ from Google.cn?

There is an important technical difference between the two
operations. Baidu's servers are physically inside China. This makes
them very fast--queries don't have to go overseas or be processed by
the cumbersome Great Firewall filters. Moreover, Baidu pre-scrubs
its search contents to meet the strictures of the Chinese
government. So there is no question of some troublesome
material--say, about Taiwan--showing up in Baidu's results. Google,
meanwhile, is using its "real" index from servers outside China.
This means that Google's searches are often slower than Baidu's and
more likely to run into problems because of touchy material.

Baidu's advertising campaign has heavily stressed its role as the
"real," authentically Chinese search engine, while Google is the
foreign interloper. Until recently this has given Baidu a big lead
in the Chinese market, but Google appears at the moment to be making
gains.

One of your sources explains that "every bank, every foreign
manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs
VPNs to exist." Is that an exaggeration? Would it be impossible for
any of these companies to survive by relying only on the Chinese
network?

Let me put it this way. If I--in a one-person office of a foreign
company, with no financial data to transmit to the head office and
no truly urgent second-by-second transactions to conduct--feel that
I need a VPN to operate, what must it be like for Citibank? Or
Microsoft? Or Boeing? Or FedEx and Dell? Or any of the thousands of
other foreign firms operating in China that are transmitting
industrial designs, buy-and-sell securities orders, bank deposits,
and so on? This is the one area in which China literally cannot
afford to crack down. Foreign companies are the backbone of its
export economy, and without VPNs they just couldn't do their work.

What do you think will happen as more and more Chinese have access
(through their work with Western companies or private VPNs) to the
uncensored Internet?

This is a version of the one truly impossible-to-answer question
about China: What's going to become of it? Will it loosen up, as
more people become more prosperous and better informed? Will it
maintain the status quo, precisely because people are more
prosperous and less inclined to rock the boat? I just don't know.
The one thing that is clear is that the simple faith of the
1990s--that communication would mean liberalization--just isn't
true. Maybe things will become more liberal in China, but despite
the spread of communications technology no one can be sure that will
occur.

About 70 percent of Internet users in the United States have used
the Web to shop. How will the proliferation of credit cards in China
affect the government's ability to monitor Internet activity?

Online commerce in China is truly strange, by American standards.
It's both highly advanced and extremely rudimentary. Let me
illustrate in two ways.

1) I very frequently use an online service called CTrip to book
domestic airline tickets in China. I use its search systems to find
the best schedules and the best fares. I place my order. And then,
two hours later, a man from CTrip comes on a motorbike to my
apartment to collect the payment in cash. Information is easily
transmitted via the Internet in China. But the degree of suspicion
about anything involving money is so vast that online payments are
difficult and rare.

2) The Dell computer company is very successful in China, and I
ordered a printer from its Web site. After choosing the one I wanted
and clicking "Buy Now," I had to go to a deposit office in the
center of the city and hand over the cash. Again, e-commerce is
sophisticated in China, except when money changes hands.

Do you think that Western companies (e.g., Skype, Google) doing
business in China  have any alternative to abiding by the
government's rules?

No. If they defied Chinese law, they couldn't operate here at all.
What good would that do? More generally, if I were making a list of
the forces that keep Chinese people from getting the information
they might want, this "complicity" by U.S. firms would be far, far
down the list. The purely Chinese media are very thoroughly
controlled by the state authorities. Yes, Chinese media operations
often scheme to find ways around the controls. (This is a vast topic
for another time.) But if Google, Skype, etc. decided not to operate
at all in China, the only effect would be to leave Chinese citizens
less informed than they might otherwise be.

You mention that China tries not to antagonize important groups
needlessly. Why? Has that approach backfired in the past?

This also is a vast topic for another time, but I think most
Americans would be amazed by the difference between their standard
image of the Chinese "regime" and what day-to-day life here is like.
Most Americans think this is an all-powerful central government;
most of the time, it looks like a relatively weak, remote titular
leadership trying to tell the equivalent of warlords (provincial
governors) what they should do. Most Americans think China is a
thoroughgoing dictatorship that can squash its critics or tell them
to shut up.

In fact, most studies of Chinese government suggest that it needs to
maintain a kind of "legitimacy," even without elections, both by
keeping living standards up for most of its people and by not
oppressing people any more than it thinks it needs to. The slogan of
the current Hu-Wen regime, now entering its second five-year term,
is "harmonious society." Specifically, this means dealing with (or
talking about) the environmental disaster that is modern China, the
income extremes between billionaires of the cities and impoverished
rural families, the plight of migrant workers, etc. Conceptually, it
can be seen as a way of addressing the main sources of widespread
discontent and therefore of potential upheaval.

The Western press has highlighted examples of the Internet's power
to influence or change Chinese public policy. Are such policy
reversals aberrations? Publicity stunts? Or do you think these were
examples of the Internet giving Chinese civilians some leverage?

Here I'm hesitant to draw any sweeping conclusion. Clearly, to some
degree the Internet has put information outside the government's
ability to bottle it up. But case by case and issue by issue, it's
hard to say whether the authorities or "the people" will have the
upper hand. My feeling in talking about China is that I'm happy to
describe what I've seen, but I'm hesitant to say what "will" occur.
Certainly the Internet offers one more way for Chinese citizens to
organize and exchange information outside official channels. But
what exactly that will mean, in terms of redress of grievances and
shifts in power, no one really knows.

You explain that the Chinese government knows that people will find
information if they really want it--that they're just trying to make
the quest for it enough of a nuisance that people won't bother. What
does this approach say about the Chinese government's mentality as a
whole? How does it compare, for example, to that of the GDR or the
Soviet Union?

Great question! Without consciously using this term, most Americans
(I think) view China as "totalitarian." They imagine that the
government is all-powerful, that citizens are all-controlled, that
the regime is really set on interfering with all aspects of Chinese
life. Certainly China was that way during much of the Communist era.
And certainly today's regime can be ruthless when dealing with
people it views as political challenges.

But in general this regime is nothing like the those of Stalin-era
Soviet Union or the North Korea of the past fifty years. The
government's guideline seems to be: it will control anything it
feels it has to control, to maintain its monopoly on power--power
over media, political organization, education, public assembly, etc.
There are also extensive economic controls, as I tried to explain in
my article "The $1.4 Trillion Question" in the previous issue of The
Atlantic. But in general, if the government does not have to control
some part of its people's lives, it doesn't. People do not walk
around glancing over their shoulders to see whether they're being
trailed. I was here in the 1980s, when people did walk around in
that cowering way. It's a big difference.