China weaves a nasty web
The picturesque town of Wuzhen will be in the headlines this week. It is a remarkably attractive river town, tiny by Chinese standards with just 60,000 residents. And that pretty much ends any nice things there are to say about China’s Second World Internet Conference which is being held there. It’s a three-day event beginning on Wednesday and will feature President Xi Jinping as the keynote speaker.
The president’s opening speech is appropriate. As the man in charge of everything in China, he is both responsible and accountable for the lamentable misuse his government makes of the world’s greatest communication facility. In the lead-up to World Internet Conference 2.0, China’s top experts were seemingly everywhere, giving Orwellian speeches and interviews to justify the nation’s abuse of the internet.
Orwellian is the precise term to describe China’s “newspeak” descriptions of the internet at home. It was on full display last week, particularly by Lu Wei. Mr Lu is China’s internet czar, in charge of all internet and cyber-security policy in the country. He also is a smooth politician, quick with a quip but darkly totalitarian about both the role and methods of the internet in the eyes of the Communist Party.
In Mr Lu’s version, for example, there is no “great firewall” that blocks content from China’s millions. It is actually the Golden Shield Project, he explains, protecting the country from incoming filth and rumours, and preventing outgoing national secrets from reaching traitors. China does not censor at all, Mr Lu explained to international media last week, but it manages the internet.
That, again, is actually the main theme of the Second World Internet Conference — China attempting to convince the world that rule of law can prevent use of the internet for negative purposes. The VIP guest list indicates this will be a pretty easy sell for Beijing. The only heads of government will be the prime ministers of Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
They will undoubtedly applaud Mr Xi and Mr Lu when those men describe what Beijing calls “a multilateral, democratic, transparent international internet governance system that will better benefit the whole world”.
The truth, as most people already know, is quite different. The official theme of the conference is China’s “Interconnected World Shared and Governed by All”.
The reality is an internet with the giant Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, just like in Thailand, but without Facebook, Google and Twitter. Companies beholden to Beijing and ultimately controlled by China, good. Other internet companies, bad.
China has added nuance and moral corruption to its censorship. It allows foreign internet companies to do business in China, but only if they agree to every fragment of Chinese censorship rules. Social network LinkedIn, for example, abandoned its principles to set up a rigorously policed Chinese-language site. The CVs are there, but professional banter is censored.
Mr Lu maintains that “Controlling the internet is necessary in order to correct rumours”. This is more doublespeak. By “rumours”, he especially means news or views inconvenient to the country’s rulers. The international media freedom group Reporters Without Borders has called for a full boycott of this week’s conference in beautiful Wuzhen.
The RSF in fact ranks China as the world’s No.1 “enemy of the internet”. It is worse than Iran which, however, is currently getting help from Beijing to tighten its own “clean internet” project.
There is much to admire in China’s growing wealth, power and influence. But Thai leaders are being criticised for getting too close to China, and its internet policy is one area from which Bangkok should steer clear.