China has the biggest number of internet users in the world, but, as the Olympic torch lurches towards Beijing, the government is determined to stamp out online dissent among its citizens
JIN JING, a disabled athlete from Shanghai, fought off Tibetan independence activists in Paris, doing everything she could to protect the Olympic torch as rogue splittists tried to extinguish the sacred flame. "At that moment, I only thought to protect the torch!" said the fencing champion, fighting for her country's honour on the streets of the French capital.
Her chin hurt, she strongly lifted her head and raised the torch in her hand. Chinese students at the scene were in tears, shouting: "Girl, be strong! Come on! China, Come on!"
This stirring report is not from a 1950s propaganda movie, but is from one of three articles in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, about the Olympic torch relay through Western cities last week.
In China, where all areas of media activity are tightly controlled by the government, where dissent is forbidden and can earn a writer expressing a wrong opinion a jail sentence, the Olympic torch relay has been an outstanding success so far.
The coverage on the official news agency Xinhua has shown smiling athletes and civic leaders passing the torch around the major cities of the world - London, Paris, San Francisco.
The news reports quote leaders and passers-by wishing Beijing well in hosting the Games in August. When there was minor interference by a few crank elements, heroes such as Jin Jing were there to step in and save the day. The stories on the Xinhua website have reported the torch relay exactly as it should have happened in the minds of the organisers.
Except the torch relay didn't go this way, as nearly everyone in the rest of the world knows if they have unfettered access to the internet and to a free press and if they are allowed to experience differing opinions on world events.
China is freer now than it has ever been at any point in its history. It has the biggest number of internet users in the world, more than the US, and its citizens enjoy more liberty than they ever did under the emperors or under the Communist Party before or during the Cultural Revolution. They have money in their pockets and they can express their views relatively openly on the streets.
THAT SAID, THE mechanisms of state control have never been so finely honed. The view of the world from behind the Great Firewall of China remains distant, blurred, filled with huge gaps and is all too often simply wrong.
For those around the world who wish to use Beijing's hosting of the Olympic Games as a platform from which to pressure China on human rights, on Tibetan autonomy and the rights of other ethnic groups in China, and on press freedom and greater representation for its people, the hijacking of the Olympic torch relay by Tibetan independence activists has been an outstanding success.
The internet is generally slower in China, and trying to access anything at all controversial is maddening - until a couple of weeks ago the BBC website was blocked until it was weirdly and inexplicably freed up at the height of the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet. Trying to access forbidden terms produces a message telling you the website cannot be accessed, and you have to restart your browser to start searching again - time-consuming and annoying.
At times of great stress, such as the immediate aftermath of the Tibetan violence, sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and those of most Western newspapers are blocked by the net nannies, who toil for the considerably less benign-sounding "Operation Golden Shield", which stops free access to the internet.
This sinister project has made blogging a dangerous occupation. It is difficult to open politically sensitive blogs. Most are hosted by big web companies, but they unilaterally block risky content to avoid getting shut down.
There are tens of thousands of spooks working for the Great Firewall, blocking e-mails, monitoring websites, and reporting back to superiors.
These controls will mostly likely be removed during the Games on the express wishes of the International Olympic Committee, but they do exist right now and they are real.
The internet is used to put forward the official line of the Communist Party. Whenever the anti-torch actions have been mentioned, it has been brief and the tone has been aggrieved.
Qu Yingpu, spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Organisation Committee (BOCOG) said the torch relay started smoothly in Paris, but encountered protests from a few "pro-Tibet independence" activists, although the welcome had generally been warm.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu described the events of Paris as "despicable". China's Ambassador to the US, Zhou Wenzhong, said: "This disgusting conduct is unpopular and doomed to fail." Having visited Tibetan areas in China, particularly the Labrang monastery in Xiahe during last month's recent riots, and witnessed first-hand huge numbers of heavily armed militia squaring off against shaven-headed monks in flowing maroon robes and sandals, it is incredibly irritating to be constantly informed in state organs that the riots were solely attacks by gangsters on ethnic Han Chinese, orchestrated by that vile criminal mastermind, the Dalai Lama and his clique, as well as having to read constantly that Western reporting on the matter has been biased and anti-Chinese.
Foreign journalists are not allowed into Tibet. They have to sneak in, or wait weeks for approval from Lhasa.
Tibetans certainly attacked the Chinese and dreadful outrages took place, in Lhasa in particular. In Beijing, I spoke to one young woman who was nearly beaten to death by angry Tibetans in Lhasa and still bore the scars, physical and emotional, of a terrifying ordeal when she was surrounded, beaten and kicked.
The events of last month must have been awful for the Han Chinese settlers living in the Himalayan region. And China's claim that it has brought wealth and development aid to the region is true.
BUT AT NO time has there even been a mention in the Chinese media that the Tibetans might have some kind of grievance, or that they may be unhappy about Chinese rule. Monks tell of Communist cadres coming to monasteries, stamping on pictures of the Dalai Lama and urging them to denounce their spiritual leader, which is like going to Glenstal Abbey, rifling through the monks' possessions for pictures of the Pontiff and then asking the clergymen there to denounce the Pope and his "clique".
"For us, Tibet is, was and always will be, China. There was no other point of view. The Tibetans we saw on TV were always happy, the ones we read about in newspapers were doing well economically and we went there because we were happy to be Tibetan. How were we supposed to know?" said one intelligent, politically engaged young woman in her late 20s, and a recent graduate of one of Beijing's most prestigious academies. For her, it was during a year abroad that she started to look at the other side of the argument on the Tibetan issue. She is in a minority on - many Chinese students become even more nationalist during their time at foreign universities. Some of the more vocal protestors responding to the anti-Chinese demonstrators in London and Paris were university students.
This is the generation which one pundit said has been "reared on wolf's milk", who know nothing else.
The internet has proven a handy tool for whipping up xenophobia and jingoism in the wake of the Tibetan riots, focusing on outlets such as CNN as handy scapegoats, even though their sins were relatively modestcompared to the scale of the crackdown on Tibet and surrounding areas. As such, the reaction among webizens to the news about the torch relay has been predictably irate.
"Fuck! After reading this news I am really angry! Although I cannot go abroad, as soon as torch comes back to China, then we'll see which animals dare to try and rob the torch. I will first eliminate the animal's family. Anyone who helps to eliminate the Dalai Lama, I will give him my own life," wrote one blogger.
"I've just watched the 'Sports News' of CCTV, and I found the 'Tibet independence' elements too aggressive. They were asking to be beaten up. That may work in Paris, but if you dared to try and take our torch away in Xidan in Beijing, you're asking to die!" said another blogger on Sohu.com. Other messages urged Chinese to spit on the Tibetan separatists and drown them.
These bloggers are unlikely to face government censure for airing their views. When the foreign ministry was asked about anti-CNN online rants which bordered on incitement to violence and forced the broadcaster to move office for safety's sake, the official basically said it was CNN's own fault.
But, even if most Chinese share the government view, there are dissenting voices. Some of them are on widely used services such as QQ, Fanfou and Jiwai. Web channels that allow Chinese users to register for free and hold discussions openly with other users do exist and are used by Chinese webizens.
One popular online forum in southern China, which gets millions of hits every day, disguised itself as a tourist site about Tibet, and included run of the mill stories about going to Tibet to visit. However, below the stories, in the comment section, people filled the site with questions, criticisms and reports of troop movements.
In the West, China's staging of the Olympics is seen as a litmus test of its ability to demonstrate a willingness to change its position on human rights, democracy, Tibet, Darfur, Xinjiang - all the issues associated with Chinese authoritarianism and one-party rule.
But it's not viewed that way in China. For the Chinese, and this includes the vast majority on the streets, winning the Olympics was seen as gaining a seal of approval for the way the country operates. China may have made vague pledges to improve human rights, increase representation for its people and become a more responsible global power, but China sees the Olympics more as an opportunity to showcase its success and its rising influence than anything else. The Beijing government believes it has earned the right to sit at the top table internationally.
And, like Jin Jing, who so bravely faced down efforts to sabotage the torch relay, the Chinese are prepared to defend this right with their lives.
