The clampdown is futile. As fast as Beijing can erect barriers, the country’s Net users keep finding ways around them. They know the government has access to any e-mail sent to or from mainland-based Internet service providers. No problem. Chinese privacy lovers can hook up to Yahoo or Hotmail for free e-mail accounts outside their government’s jurisdiction. The online cops can block access to any foreign Web site they deem unsuitable–but what of it? For anyone who knows how to navigate, the Web has “proxy servers,” sites designed to function as untraceable detours around such obstacles. The trick is hardly a state secret, even in China. Mainstream technology magazines there have run detailed reports on the servers, providing readers with the equivalent of how-to manuals.
Ultimately there’s one way China can stop the deluge of forbidden ideas: by unplugging itself. And that’s not likely. Beijing’s leaders are convinced that China’s future depends on embracing the Net. President Jiang Zemin said as much at an international computer conference a few weeks ago in Beijing. “We should deeply recognize the tremendous power of information technology and vigorously promote its development,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted him as saying. “The speed and scope of its transmission have created a borderless information space around the world.” His own son Jiang Mianheng has become an IT heavyweight in Shanghai.
Change is sure to come even faster after China joins the World Trade Organization, a milestone now expected within a few months. The market forces that are unleashed in China will make information technology “even cheaper, better and more widely available,” Bill Clinton told an audience at Johns Hopkins University’s graduate school of foreign affairs earlier this year. “We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we’re already an open society. Imagine how much it can change China.” Um, yes, a listener spoke up, but weren’t Chinese authorities at that very moment trying to control e-content and limit foreign ownership of Web-related companies in China? The president grinned. “Good luck,” he said. “That’s like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
The revolution has barely begun. So far the most blatant impact has been in realms the older generation tries to ignore, such as dating and popular music (story). But as the following profiles illustrate, the Internet has begun loosening the party’s control over other aspects of daily life: career choices, sexual freedom, political protest and, not least, the Internet itself. Roughly 85 percent of China’s Web users are between 18 and 35. By the end of this year their total number is expected to reach 20.8 million. Beijing-based Internet consultancy BDA China says the figure is nearly doubling every six months. At this rate the country’s online population will exceed 120 million by 2004, making China one of the three biggest Internet users in the world, along with Japan and the United States.
Even then, don’t bet on instant democracy. Greater freedom, sure. But liberalization isn’t the same as democracy. The Internet is a great equalizer, serving as a podium for all comers regardless of their ideas’ merit–or lack of it. Hate groups can harness its power just as readily as social progressives. China’s online bulletin boards occasionally erupt with anti-Western diatribes and calls for an immediate invasion of Taiwan. In any case, China’s people have no intention of redesigning their culture according to Western specifications.
This is not the Tiananmen generation. The less these young people have to deal with politics, the happier they are. Scores of self-described hackers and computer-security experts gathered several weeks ago for a conference in Beijing. “Hackers are like the cowboys of the American Wild West,” one attendee boasted to the local press. “The only laws they follow are the laws in their own heads.” That kind of individualism used to be unthinkable in China. Now it’s spreading like the Internet. Look ahead a few years–and multiply his voice by a hundred million.
