10 Nov 14 | China, News and features, Tibet
![Photo: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Vienna, Austria [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Vienna_2012-05-26_-_Europe_for_Tibet_Solidarity_Rally_158_Lobsang_Sangay.jpg)
Lobsang Sangay at a solidarity rally for Tibet in 2012 (Photo: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Vienna, Austria [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)
It was not, to say the least, what he had been expecting. Just a few weeks earlier, Sangay had become Tibet’s new political leader, taking over all political authority from the Dalai Lama after winning an election held among exiled Tibetans all across the world. It had been his first day in parliament in Dharamsala, where the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is based, and his entire cabinet had just been unanimously approved — a cause for celebration.
Yet that same day, a top-secret memo about an upcoming visit to the US had somehow been obtained from the government’s computers, and leaked into the public domain. “Everything was supposed to be very confidential, and the memo was only meant for three people in Washington DC,” Sangay tells Pao-Pao.
His assistants recommended cancelling the trip altogether. “It’s all out,” they told Sangay. “Nothing is a secret.” Their worries were not unwarranted. The Chinese government had started pressuring the American politicians listed in the memo to cancel their meeting with Sangay. Still, he pushed ahead. “I said: ‘We are going to Washington DC, on the same dates as described in the memo, and we are meeting with the same people as in the memo. That’s the only way we can respond to Beijing’s bullying.’”
Security upgrade
In the end, the visit went ahead as planned. But the attack was a shock to Sangay. “First of all, that Beijing is so capable of penetrating our computers that they can get at even our very confidential memos,” he says. “But also, that when I came back to the office, they were logging into every computer in the office and trying to shut it down, trying to track down which computer was affected with a virus and how they stole the secret memo. The whole place was shut down.”
It wasn’t the first time that the Tibetan administration had found itself under Chinese cyber attack. In 2008, the large-scale cyber spying operation Ghostnet managed to extract emails and other data from the CTA. Ghostnet also affected other Tibet-related organisations, as well as embassies and government organisations across the world. A year later, ShadowNet was employed, which researchers from the Infowar Monitor (IWM) at the University of Toronto called a form of “cyber espionage 2.0”.
The IWM researchers were able to establish that the hackers worked from within China, but they have been hesitant to link these hackers to the Chinese government due to a lack of direct evidence. However, an American cable released by Wikileaks describes a “sensitive report” that was able to establish a connection between the attackers’ location and the Chinese army.
The 2011 attack propelled Sangay to tighten the administration’s digital security. “At the time, there was a different mindset about it: ‘Oh, we can’t do much about it, Beijing can do whatever it wants,’” he recalls. Sangay, who was an outsider to Tibetan politics and had spent the sixteen years before he was elected at Harvard Law School, didn’t agree. “I thought that we could upgrade our security to a certain level. Now, even if we have a virus, it’s only on one computer, we can isolate it.”
But while the CTA’s office might no longer grind to a halt when a computer is infected, attacks have continued unabated. In 2012, a Chinese cyber attack infiltrated at least 30 computer systems of Tibetan advocacy groups for over ten months. In 2013, the CTA’s website Tibet.net was compromised in a so-called watering hole attack, which allows hackers to spy on and subsequently attack website visitors.
Greg Walton, an internet security researcher at Oxford University, is concerned at the growing number of these watering hole attacks. When they are combined with attacks that exploit software vulnerabilities, he argues that “there is essentially no defence for the end user, and no amount of awareness or training will mitigate the threat.”
Sangay does not believe that absolute security is possible. “Beijing is still, I am sure, trying to steal things. And I am sure they are successful, in some sense. But we also have to try to make it a little more difficult,” he says. “I assume my email is being read on a daily basis. The Pentagon, the CIA, multinational companies are all being hacked, and they are spending hundreds of millions to protect themselves.”
Sangay throws up his hands: “Poor me! My administration’s budget is around 50 plus million dollars. Even if I would spend my whole budget to protect my email account, that still wouldn’t be enough.”
No attachment, please
Sangay does believe that many problems can be avoided with a few basic precautions. He uses very long passwords for instance, and changes them often to prevent hacks of his own email account. And, he says: “You always have to follow Buddha’s message. What would Buddha say if you send him an email? ‘No attachment please!’” Sangay laughs. “One of the cardinal sins in Buddhism is attachment. Well, Buddha’s lessons, who said that 2,500 years ago, are still valid.”
Holding himself to “Buddha’s teachings” has prevented Sangay from getting his computer infected many times — although there have been some close calls. Take for example the time Time magazine’s editor Hanna Beech emailed him, a week prior to a scheduled interview in Dharamsala.
“She sent me the ten questions she would ask me. I found that very generous, journalists sending me questions ahead of time!” Sangay was about to download the attachment — but then he paused. “I grew a bit suspicious, so I decided to write back to her to ask if it was really her.” Beech said it wasn’t.
The attack was sophisticated, but not uncommon, Sangay says. “We get that on a daily basis, literally; some Tibetan support group or someone from our office sends an email that will contain a virus.”
Strengthening bonds
For the Tibetan government, digital communications have offered Chinese hackers a welcome point of attack. But Sangay also emphasises the positive sides of the internet: “Despite the [Great] Firewall, information breaks through, and is exchanged. That is happening, and that is not something that the Chinese government or any other government can prevent.”
He points to the 2008 protests in Tibet as one example. In the protests, which some dubbed “the cellphone revolution”, written reports, videos and photos from eyewitnesses were able to make their way to the rest of the world via mobile phones.
Additionally, the internet has allowed the Tibetan Central Administration in Dharamsala, home of about 100,000 Tibetans, to strengthen its bonds with the approximately 50,000 exiled Tibetans living elsewhere. Sangay says that the exile community — “scattered across some forty countries” — keeps in touch mainly through the internet.
“The internet has been very vital. The other day, I was speaking to Tibetans in Belgium. I asked them how many log in to Tibet.net, our website, and how many watch Tibetan online TV. About 40% raised their hands.” Tibetans from inside Tibet even manage to send Sangay “one-off messages” via Facebook from time to time. “Things like: ‘I wish you well’, from Facebook accounts that are immediately deleted.”
Dangerous, but helpful
Tibetans inside and outside of China now also communicate constantly via WeChat, but that is not without danger. A year ago, two monks in Tibet were arrested and jailed after posting pictures of self-immolations via the chat app. “Many say it’s very dangerous, because it’s an app by a Chinese company,” Sangay concedes. Still, he also considers it “very helpful and informative” as long as it is used to discuss safe topics.
The Tibetan administration consciously abstains from contacting Tibetans inside China “for fear that we might jeopardise them,” Sangay says. “We get a little less than 100,000 readers to our website every month, and we know many are from inside Tibet and China as well. We know it’s happening, but we really don’t make deliberate efforts [to contact them], and we also don’t keep track.”
Skyping with Woeser
Since Sangay was elected, it has been too risky for him to keep in touch with Tibetans in China via the internet. But before his election, like many others, he was in touch with those inside China almost every day. During his years at Harvard, he often Skyped with the famed Tibetan blogger and activist Tsering Woeser.
“It almost became an everyday ritual. I would go to the office, and then at a particular time I would log on and we would talk for half hour or more. Because her Tibetan wasn’t good, I became her unpaid, amateur Tibetan language teacher.” Sangay laughs as he recalls Woeser’s unsuccessful attempts to crack jokes in her — at the time — mediocre Tibetan.
Unfortunately, Sangay says he “had to stop talking to her for fear that I might endanger her”. But he still admires her work: “She is a good source of information. She compiles information from inside and shares with the rest of the world. She is very bold.” He considers bloggers like her an invaluable resource for those who want to know what life in Tibet is really like.
So will the internet ultimately be a force for good or evil? Sangay doesn’t know. “It all depends on who uses it. For good, if more good people use it.” On the one hand, he is in awe at how nowadays “in zero seconds, at almost zero cost, you can send vast volumes of information”. But he worries about the security side of the internet. “Ultimately, the [power] dynamic is so asymmetrical. One has wealth, and control over access to stronger and better technology, and one doesn’t.”
That, of course, is a power dynamic that the Tibetan leader has long ago gotten accustomed to. “I think the David and Goliath battle will go on, even on the internet,” Sangay says. “Ultimately, if David will prevail, we will have to see.”
This article is also available in Chinese at Pao-Pao.net
This article was posted on 10 November at indexoncensorship.org with permission from Pao-Pao.net
23 Oct 14 | China, Digital Freedom, News and features
(Image: Screengrab from linecorp.com/en/)
The instant messaging app LINE has strengthened its censorship methods in mainland China, according to new findings from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The academic researchers not only found proof that the app now censors more topics than ever before, but also that LINE is censoring in a way that is harder to detect for the average user.
Want to discuss the China’s ruling Communist Party (CPC) with your friends on LINE? Go ahead. Compare foreign leaders to dictators? No problem, chat away. Unless you mention both the CPC and dictatorship in one chat message, you won’t notice LINE’s new censorship policy. That’s because LINE recently “improved” its censorship methods in China by adding almost fifty so-called regular expressions to its long list of taboo subjects; that is, groups of words that users are allowed to use independently, but not in combination.
The findings are interesting because LINE’s novel use of regular expressions allows a more subtle form of censorship, argues Jason Q. Ng, one of the researchers at the University of Toronto. “It allows for a more nuanced censorship for topics such as Xinjiang, instead of just a blanket block,” he told Pao-Pao over the phone, referring to the western province which has long been plagued by tensions between Chinese authorities and the indigenous Uighur people.
That’s positive for the authorities, he explains: “If you hide a smaller set of things, less people will encounter censorship than if you block everything related to a certain topic. Many people might want to speak in a so-called ‘legitimate’ way on a topic like Xinjiang, so if [the censors] block everything related to the topic, it will just make those people curious about the censorship, and the reasons behind its existence.”
Ng says that he thinks that the new method of censorship will only hinder the small minority of people already aware of the existence of censorship. One of the new, blocked combinations of words on LINE includes “Xinjiang”（新疆）and “independent” (獨立). Similar censorship techniques have already been implemented on Weibo, also known as Chinese Twitter.
There’s a whimsical name for the phenomenon that the Chinese authorities are trying to avoid with these new techniques: the Streisand effect, after American singer Barbara Streisand. In 2003, she attempted to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California by suing a photographer. The lawsuit ended up inadvertently generating a storm of publicity: whereas only six people had viewed the photographs before the lawsuits — two of which were her attorneys — the case caused 420,000 people to look up the photos within the month.
But it is a serious principle, as demonstrated earlier this month, during the protests in Hong Kong which were in a sense also a prime example of the dreaded Streisand effect. After a few students were teargassed by the police in an effort to suppress their protest, local outrage and support only swelled, resulting in a much higher turnout at demonstrations on the following days.
The Citizen Lab researchers have been tracking and analyzing LINE’s censorship for close to a year. They have reverse engineered the application, finding that when the user’s country is set to China it will enable censorship by downloading a list of banned words from a website called Naver. Whenever the list is updated, they study the differences compared to previous lists.
In a post on their website, Citizen Lab also show users how they can change their regional settings, allowing them to circumvent censorship on LINE within China.
In Citizen Lab’s report on the new methods, the researchers conclude that the new list “demonstrates LINE Corporation’s continued commitment to filtering keywords for users based in China and a push to improve the underlying technology”.
Still, Jason Q. Ng says that it is hard to say whether LINE’s censorship is better or worse than other chat apps like WeChat. “For LINE it is easier to see the exact way they censor,” he says. “Normally we can’t do that: we have to test the app word by word. We are still working on WeChat. Also, it depends on the way you measure: some apps might censor less, but have the ability to surveil a lot. That might be worse for the users.”
This article was originally published at pao-pao.net
20 Jun 14 | China, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Photo: Macmillan)
In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, American journalist Evan Osnos said that he turned down the opportunity to publish a copy of his new book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China because an initial report from the censors came back asking for almost a quarter to be struck out.
The only surprising thing about this is that they were only planning to cut about 25%. Osnos’ book follows the lives of a cast of characters as they pursue their dreams – whether that be for money, for love, for dignity for freedom or justice. He does not hold back listing the faults of China’s authoritarian system – the corruption, the hypocrisy, the lies, the control, and the censorship itself. Among the cast of characters that Osnos follows a fair few are clearly a no-go – among them imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng and outspoken artist Ai Weiwei among them.
Osnos declined to publish because: “to produce a ‘special version’ that plays down dissent, trims the Great Leap Forward, and recites the official history of [former official] Bo Xilai’s corruption would not help Chinese readers. On the contrary, it would endorse a false image of the past and present. As a writer, my side of the bargain is to give the truest story I can.”
For Osnos it wasn’t just a matter of how much of the book would have to go — a lie is a lie whether it is a big one or a small one. He told Index on Censorship: “It’s a slippery slope. If you agree to cut five paragraphs or 10% of the text or 25%, where do you stop?”
Osnos’ op-ed has highlighted the dilemma writers face publishing in China. The mainland is now hungry for western works. A publisher approached Osnos and not the other way around. American journalist Peter Hessler, who was the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker before Osnos, published two of his China books on the mainland, County Driving and River Town. He said that they both sold more than 150,000 copies in China. Country Driving actually sold more copies in China than they did in the US. In the first 10 months of last year, 650,000 censored copies of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel, professor emeritus at Harvard University, were bought in China. Around 10% of the book was excised.
Osnos wouldn’t compromise, but Hessler and Vogel did, for different reasons.
Hessler says he felt that he owed it to the people he was writing about to give them access to what he was saying about them. “The longer that I wrote about China, the less comfortable I was with the fact that readers in these places could not read what I was writing about them,” Hessler told Index on Censorship. “It’s an unhealthy dynamic that is common all over the developing world – the foreign correspondent often feels like he’s exporting stories. He doesn’t receive local feedback, and there’s a risk that he isn’t fully accountable to his subjects.”
Hessler’s books tend to follow communities and as such are less sensitive. “The general pattern is to cut references to national leaders or events, while leaving detailed descriptions of local events,” notes Hessler. Just a few pages were cut from both books out of more than 400 pages – changes, he thought, that did not “strike at the core of either book.” He did not try to publish another of his China books, Oracle Bones, because it was much more sensitive and would have faced significant cuts.
Vogel argued that his work opened the door to a more open discussion. “Many Chinese academics were appreciative that my book had expanded the range of freedom, allowing them to discuss more topics than had been possible before the book was published,” he wrote on The Harvard University Press website.
The danger is of course, even if the book does spark discussion, even if the censor does let some “sensitive” details slip through, readers are largely unaware of what was changed and thus the version they read ends up perpetuating the official line.
“If the censorship would change the point or substance of the book, then readers will come away with a, not just limited, but actually incorrect understanding of what the author was trying to say,” notes Eric Abrahamsen, an American publishing consultant and literary translator based in Beijing. “In the case of Evan Osnos’ book, losing 25% would mean that readers would believe that he thinks differently than he actually does. That would be incredibly pernicious, and isn’t remotely worth it.”
Vogel’s decision has earned him scathing criticism from Perry Link, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Link, who is famous for describing Chinese censorship as “the anaconda in the chandelier”, says that rather than opening the doors to discussion, Vogel’s censored book props up the Party’s line.
“The 10% that is omitted from Ezra’s book is not a random 10%,” he said. “It is a 10% that distorts the reader’s overall impression of the whole — i.e., the other 90% as well. Ezra’s book is very favourable to the regime. If 10% is omitted, it reads like a flat-out, all-out endorsement by a Harvard professor of Chinese Communist Party authoritarian rule.”
This article was published on June 20, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
19 Jun 14 | China
China’s censors have a hard time stamping out memes.
Memes are proving one of the most powerful weapons Chinese netizens can use to fight online censorship. In the weeks on either side of this year’s 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Chinese censors blocked a variety of terms on social media, including “blood”, “May 35” and even “today”, but references to the event kept on emerging in memes. Images alluding to the infamous “Tank Man” took on a variety of forms, using heads of Mao, tractors, lego and the iconic Hong Kong rubber duck in lieu of circulating the actual iconic photo.
The concept of the meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to explain certain ideas, catchphrases, trends and other pieces of cultural information that replicate through a population. In its current usage, memes are defined as cultural items in the form of an image, video or phrase that spreads via the internet and are often altered in a creative or humorous way.
They’ve been part of the Chinese blogosphere for years and in many ways are ideally suited to the Chinese context. In part this is because Mandarin as a language allows for a playful form of double entrendre. Due to its many tones even the slightest shift in pronunciation can change a word’s meaning, while still sounding similar enough to invoke comparisons. The most famous Chinese meme, which parodies censorship itself, is that of the grass mud horse — caonima. In certain tones caonima means an alpaca; in other tones it’s a famous Chinese profanity. A few years back a video depicting a grass mud horse defeating a river crab, hexie, which is a homonym for the propaganda catchword “harmony”, went viral. To this day memes relating to this still emerge to poke fun at Chinese authorities.
Herein lies the strength of memes; their ability to evolve quickly and to imply rather than state makes them very difficult to detect and delete. After all, it’s hard enough for Chinese censors to keep track of and block all search terms directly referencing taboo topics. It’s harder still to block the infinite variations of words and images that might allude to controversy.
“Due to advanced and pervasive censorship, Chinese netizens are often forced to use coded language and images to talk about the social and political issues they find important,” says Ben Valentine, strategist and contributing writer for The Civic Beat, which examines social change memes and viral media.
“Images are much harder to algorithmically block because machines have trouble understanding visual content. While online writing directly talking about anything to do with Tiananmen Square in 1989 is extremely difficult, some of these memes make it past the censors. This is partially why, despite pervasive censorship, the Chinese web still remains a quite lively and active online space,” he adds.
For David Bandhurs, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, anyone who engages on a regular basis with others in the Chinese internet space “understands that irony, parody and other forms of expressive subterfuge are absolutely essential”. Memes “are the very substance of self-expression, of which social and political expression are a part, in a repressive space”.
Ahead of the 4th June anniversary, Bandhurs posted a photo of his milk carton to Weibo (China’s Twitter). The expiration date was “04/06/14” and he wrote: “It’s not yet expired. We have to remember.”
“This was a very casual post, its point being to share a momentary thought with my community, a thought which for some might prompt a moment of esprit de corps, or a moment of reflection,” he tells Index.
“A lot of memes emerge, and they emerge constantly, in exactly this way. They encapsulate a thought or a feeling — often with a strong social or political dimension — that cannot be openly expressed. For example, the meme ‘My father is Li Gang’ quickly became emblematic of the injustice and inequality resulting from unchecked power. It was like a key that could open a box of thoughts no one could make very explicit.”
Just how effective are these memes? When shared instantly and abundantly across platforms like Weibo, they can be very powerful. In some instances Chinese memes have spurred a call to action, as was the case with those that knocked Beijing’s poor air quality. Until recently, the government denied the extent of the pollution. Conversation on the topic was silenced. Then photos of blue sky days and other related memes emerged. Now the government is approaching the topic with more transparency.
As for those topics which still remain off limits, memes provide an alternative form of political discourse. The China Digital Times sees caonima specifically as the “the icon of online resistance to censorship”.
Memes represent a way in which Chinese people momentarily seize control of conversations. For example, when blind activist and lawyer Chen Guangcheng was arrested, thousands of people posted photos of themselves wearing sunglasses in protest. While it might not seem like the biggest act of defiance, it’s still something in a nation where free speech and collective action are strictly controlled.
“These memes allow for more expression, a political conversation to start, for humor around a taboo subject; this is an incredibly empowering feeling. The ability to connect, talk, laugh, and touch on politics feels good,” explains Valentine.
Speaking of memes more generally, Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web, tells Index:
“The power of politically-oriented memes is that they can be used in a playful way that isn’t necessarily directly confrontational to a regime. In some cases, the regime doesn’t even realize they’re being undermined. This allows activists to openly protest with impunity or even anonymity.”
At the same time, it’s important not to overstate the power of memes in China. Most vanish in the cyberspace vortex. Bandhurs’ milk carton post, for example, had more than 3,000 views, but could not be shared or commented upon, taking the sting out of it.
Memes are also predominantly harmless and politically apathetic. An office worker in Beijing, Wang Meimei, 28, said she and her friends constantly share memes. These solely relate to entertainment, not politics, because “we’re not interested in that”.
Meanwhile, 35-year-old Huang Yeping, who works in news media in Beijing, says none of the recent memes he has seen capture any form of zeitgeist.
“Is it me or have Chinese become even more subdued in terms of political expression, so much so that they haven’t been able to create anything as infectious as grass mud horse or a derivative of the tankman?” he asks, then adds:
“There has been this chill spreading across the cyber world.”
And as this indicates, taken alone memes cannot supersede collective action, nor do most have that in mind. They can spark a discussion, yes, yet remain as entertainment without the other key elements that bring about concrete action. What memes can do is allow for everyday Chinese to seize control of conversations — whether they be of a social, political or cultural nature — even if only for a few hours or days before the army of censors step in. And as Valentine says, that “feels good”.
This article was published on June 19, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
