Internet now making 'Great Firewall of China' very porous

Beijing Letter: Before writing this piece, I wanted to read the recent Human Rights Watch report on state censorship of the internet in China. I went to Google and put in Human Rights Watch + China + internet, and sure enough the link for the report came up. But when I clicked on it, the familiar "The page you requested is unavailable" message came up.

No big surprise there: a report on the censoring of the internet is censored. But I could read reports on the report in The Irish Times and Guardian websites. And by following links, I could bring up extensive documents on precisely the same topic from the Berkman Centre at Harvard University and from the Open Net Initiative. This was in line with my previous experience of using the internet in China.

Censorship is blatant, pervasive and nasty. But, at least in relation to those users who can read English, it's not entirely effective.

The so-called "Great Firewall of China" is a little like the original Great Wall: hugely impressive and highly intimidating, but not actually all that good at repelling those who are determined to get around it.

However outrageous the practice may be, and however contemptible the collaboration in making it work of American corporations like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco, its effects are limited by the sheer size and complexity of the world wide web. And the policy epitomises the dilemma of control in China: the economic logic of ever greater connectivity clashes with the political logic of tight control over information.

In 1996, when the large scale blocking of international websites (including, at the time, that of The Irish Times) first became obvious, China had just 20,000 internet users. By 2001, official estimates were that 22.5 million Chinese had online access. By last June, the figure had soared to 123 million. And this vast social change isn't confined to the huge modern cities of the east and south coasts.

When I was in Lhasa in Tibet recently, I wandered up the ramshackle stairs of a down-at-heel building to find an internet cafe packed with about 500 young people all blearily surfing the web or engaged in online sword-and-sorcery games.

The Chinese government has encouraged this growth in connectivity as a prerequisite to economic development, and has itself embraced the new technologies, spending almost €5 billion on e-government initiatives last year alone. It has also, albeit tentatively, begun to acknowledge the web as a useful source of information on public opinion.

The rage expressed in blogs and chat-rooms over the death in police custody of a 27-year-old migrant worker deported from Beijing to his home province of Hunan actually prompted the government to abolish the draconian regulations under which he was placed in custody.

But the state is also engaged in a gigantic electronic experiment of its own, seeking to harness the power of the internet while denying, through a combination of direct regulation and self-censorship by both multinational companies and local portals, its basic principle of open access.

Direct action is simple enough: earlier this month, for example, a website which conducted an online poll on whether there should be competitive elections to the post of general secretary of the Communist Party was closed down and its domain name terminated.

But the wider filtering operation, in which certain terms - Tibet, democracy, human rights, Falun Gong - trigger a blockage of a website, is less straightforward.

Even some of the crudest blocks are not entirely watertight. If, for example, I google "BBC" (one of the censor's pet hates), I don't even get a list of search results.

But if I go on to the Eircom site and google "BBC" from there, I not only get search results, but I can access the home page. If, from there I try to get to the news site, it's blocked.

However, I can get on to the World Service site and listen to its news programmes, or even download them on to my MP3 as a pod cast.

The New York Times is likewise blocked on the main Google page here. But, again, if I go to the Eircom site and google the paper's name along with even a controversial Chinese topic, I might well get a result.

On Friday last, for example, I used this fairly simple route to get an extensive New York Times report on the sentencing of a peasant rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, to four years in prison - a story that Chinese media had been banned from reporting.

Even in the most sensitive area of all, Tibet, the Great Firewall is partly porous. Obvious oppositional sites, like that of the government-in-exile or the Free Tibet campaign, are effectively blocked.

But I can get a great deal of information in a matter of minutes nonetheless.

I can go to Nobel Prize.org and get extensive materials on the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989, including a video of a long speech he made at a symposium in 2001.

I can go to a CNN.com special section on the Dalai Lama, with substantial audio and video interviews, news reports and links.

None of this makes the censorship any more palatable, but it does raise the question of whether, as they deal with more and more internet users and more and more English speakers, the censors can keep up with the web's prodigious multiplicity.