The Great Fire Wall of China

The Web Just Wants to Be Free

But the ever-expanding Web universe stretches well beyond the eye of even China's MII. Internet users in China report that the government either overlooked or couldn't be bothered to block a U.S. State Department archive site on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. That's just the sort of vast cybersecurity breach which international dissidents and human-rights activists intend to exploit. While they may be able to reach only a small percentage of the Chinese population, activists maintain that in a Chinese society, where Internet access is available only to the rich, the intellectuals and the students, it's not about how many people they reach, but which ones.

"What scares the Chinese government so much is that the people who have access to the Internet right now have historically been the people who have launched revolutions," says Bobson Wong, director of the Digital Freedom Network, a Web site dedicated to airing dissident voices that have been silenced in their own lands.

Leading the charge is a former Tiananmen Square activist, who goes by the pseudonym Richard Long. Every day, Long publishes a news clippings newsletter called VIP Reference that he sends to over 30,000 Chinese e-mail accounts--whether they want it or not. In short, Long is using the scourge of Western e-commerce, spamming, to advocate social change in China.

VIP Reference--known in China as Dacankao --is taken so seriously in China that early this month, one dissident, Qi Yanchen, was arrested and charged with sedition for printing copies of the newsletter to pass around. While some activists complain that Long's political mass mailing alienates people in China and endangers some underground dissidents, Long says VIP Reference feeds "an information-hungry country." With spam, of course.

Can e-Commerce Boost e-Democracy?

But is it realistic to expect Internet commerce to bring about democracy in China? After all, telling China that it's morally better to be like the West, and here's a new Pepsi ad to prove it, is unlikely to change a government that hasn't so much as flirted with democracy for over 5000 years.

At the same time, in a world where Tiananmen Square leader Ling Chai seeks to realize her ideals through a software startup, it's not surprising that someone like Long would seek to make politics and business work together. Long thinks nothing of exchanging his database of 500,000 addresses with young Chinese entrepreneurs in return for a list of their clients. "Everybody knows I have the largest Internet database in China," he says, matter-of-factly.

Despite Minister Wu's concerns over controlling the telecommunications and Internet industries, China may well already be on an unstoppable course. While the cost of PCs remains prohibitively high for the ordinary Chinese, the country's cellular and cable network offers the hope of cheap mass connectivity in the near future.

And while the Chinese may not surf as much as Americans, they certainly watch TV. There are some 320 million television sets in China, and companies such as the Web portal MyWeb are exploring the possibilities of wiring China via a vast system of set-top boxes.

So even if China chose to pursue its digital future alone, it might still be building a bigger soapbox for Long and other dissidents. You never know, the revolution may yet be televised.