"I AM JUST GOING CRAZY about how she's doing it so quickly," Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez reportedly said, as he beamed at a young Russian woman in the provincial city of Izhevsk last week. Chávez, who was on a three-day trip to Russia, did not make this statement while carousing at a local strip club. He was marveling at the IzhMash factory's female production-line workers assembling one of the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles. He had just made a deal to buy 100,000 of them. And that's not all he bought on his Russian shopping spree. There are also fighter aircraft, advanced radars, and other assorted baubles for Vene zuela's air force.
The AK-47, the weapon of choice for armies and insurgent movements around the world, was invented in Izhevsk, about 600 miles east of Moscow. Its designer, Mikhail Kalash nikov, spent most of the first 70-odd years of his life toiling in obscurity--not traveling outside of Russia until the fall of communism, when the export of Russian weapons became big business. Today, at 86, he is treated like a combination rock star/elder statesman at international defense expositions, where he is often seen wearing his Hero of the Soviet Union medals and other decorations. In the last two years, he has even launched his own brand of vodka.
But the success the AK-47's designer has had at promoting his brand has not been mirrored in the sales of his famous rifle. Earlier this year, Vladimir Grodetsky, the CEO of the IzhMash factory, bemoaned the fact that Russia makes only 10 to 12 percent of the sales of the more than one million AK-47s purchased on the world market each year. "The rest are unlicensed copies," he said in a press conference this past April.
Chávez's visit to the factory and the extensive list of agreements he signed the next day at a pomp-and-circumstance-style Kremlin cere mony are all about reversing this trend. Russia makes a number of large weapons systems--fighter aircraft, naval vessels, air defense systems--that it has sold to China and India for billions of dollars, but it has had less success with smaller weapons. More important, it has yet to make a big dent in the Latin American market.
Latin America is one of the last unexplored frontiers in the weapons-export business, as the previous money-making venues in the Pacific Rim and the Middle East have--for the time being--purchased about all they can afford for the next several years. Most of Latin America's air forces operate an odd mix of older model U.S. and French aircraft, many of which date to before the weapons embargoes that were clamped on South American dictatorships in the late 1970s. Some of these aircraft have been modernized by Israeli firms in the years since as a stop-gap, but it is only recently that the new Latin American democracies--unencumbered by those sanctions--have begun to rearm themselves with more modern weaponry.
The Chilean air force took delivery this year of the first of a batch of Lockheed Martin F-16s, and last year Brazil signed an agreement with France to purchase a number of used Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters from the French air force. Previously, Brazil's navy had purchased the Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier Foch from France, since renamed the S o Paulo, and equipped it with a wing of Douglas A-4 Skyhawk carrier aircraft that it acquired used from the Kuwaiti air force.
Russia has had no such luck on this continent. A handful of Russia's most advanced fighter jets, the Mikoyan MiG-29, were sold to Peru in the early 1990s, but these were used aircraft purchased not from Russia but from its neighbor, Belarus.
Chávez's visit and the impressive list of arms deals he signed give the Russians their first big weapons bonanza in Latin America, and enemies of Chávez, in Washington and elsewhere, another big headache. He has already taken delivery of 30,000 of the 100,000 AK-47s. Concern that many of these assault rifles might end up in the hands of Colombian rebels or the drug lord armies in the favelas around Rio de Janeiro is well-founded. But the more serious dangers created by the new Caracas-Moscow axis are longer-term and can be found in the other deals the two have reached.
The total bill for Venezuela's arms purchases in Russia will exceed $1 billion and includes 24 Sukhoi Su-35 Super Flanker fighter aircraft--a system so advanced that not even the Russian air force has this model in its inventory yet. Based on the famous Su-27 and Su-30MK fighters, the Su-35 is a slightly larger, more powerful, modernized version of its predecessors. It will incorporate the latest in avionics and weapons systems, including a radar system superior to that used by the Indian air force's Su-30MKIs, which defeated U.S. Air Force F-15 and F-16 aircraft in recent joint exercises. It will make Venezuela the big kid on the block in South America and will significantly increase the striking range of the Venezuelan air force. Chávez could conceivably now offer air support against the Americans to his friend Fidel Castro should the United States decide to take action against Cuba in the future.
There are also things to worry about in the nondefense deals that are ancillary to these arms sales contracts. Chávez is known to be incensed at the embargo on spare parts and other military assistance that the United States has placed on his country, and on two occasions he has threatened to sell the F-16s his country acquired in the 1980s during a period of good relations with Washington. On one occasion he said he would give them to the Cuban air force. Later, he suggested he might sell them instead to Iran. Although these are older export models of the F-16A/B series and are far outclassed by those operated by the U.S. Air Force today, turning them over to either of those nations would represent a technology jackpot for those dictators and a blow to U.S. interests.
The other half of the Venezuela-Russia dealings last week is just as disturbing. That's the oil deal Chávez agreed to in a meeting with LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov in Volgograd. The Russian oil company will start exploration in two areas of Venezuela, one of which, near the Orinoco River, is thought to contain substantial oil reserves.
Experience shows that when Moscow signs big weapons sales and energy deals, the tentacles of Russian organized crime are not far behind. Russia recently signed an even larger arms-plus-oil-and-gas deal with Algeria, in which the energy sector payoffs are so large that the weapons pur chases are almost like the toy prize in a McDonald's Happy Meal by comparison. "The fighters and other weapons are practically being given away in this deal," said one Moscow-based aerospace industry analyst, "and the sums of money that are being bandied about are so large it is frightening."
When the Russian mafia first became a concern in the mid-1990s, former CIA director James Woolsey testified before Congress that "if an American businessman meets with a nattily dressed and articulate Russian who claims that he is with an international trading and banking firm in Moscow and he would like to discuss a joint venture covering, say, the export of Russian oil, such an individual may be what he says he is. Or he may be a Russian intelligence officer operating under commercial cover. Or he may be an important member of a Russian organized crime group. But the really interesting point is that there is a reasonable chance that he is all three--and that none of those three institutions sees any problem with such an arrangement."
And it is just such an "arrangement" that the United States may find on its doorstep thanks to the Venezuelan president. AK-47s can come from almost anywhere these days--50 countries use this infantry weapon, and six of them even include it as an icon on their nation's coat of arms. But problems on a scale this mega-deal could cause in the Americas can only come from Moscow.
Reuben F. Johnson is the defense correspondent for Aviation International News and for Military Periscope, a Washington-based defense information service.
08/07/2006, Volume 011, Issue 44
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WANG WENYI, the woman whose shouts disrupted the welcoming ceremony for Chinese president Hu Jintao on the White House lawn on April 20, is a middle-aged pathologist and a follower of Falun Gong. That spiritual movement was outlawed in China in 1999, and since then Falun Gong has become a focal point for opposition to the Communist party. To that extent, Wang's outburst was understandable. Less obvious was the connection between her profession and the raw intensity of her denunciation of "killing" by Hu's China.
As a doctor and a Falun Gong practitioner, Wang had to be incensed by a hair-raising story coming out of northeast China--of organ harvesting from live Falun Gong prisoners. The reports, which first appeared in print in the March 10 edition of the Falun Gong-associated publication Epoch Times, are still sketchy and confirmation scarce. Yet the allegations are just credible enough to demand attention--too serious to be ignored unless proven false. What's more, recent work by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, headquartered in Boston, has turned up some compelling corroboration. Here, then, is the narrative as it has emerged so far.
Back in 1988, a hospital was constructed on a 21,087-square meter plot (about five acres) a few miles outside of Shenyang, in a satellite city called Sujiatun. It's pronounced Soo-jah-tyun, and you might want get to know that name.
It happened that the hospital--now the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine--had a large basement and an inconspicuous back door. In 2001, some employees in the hospital's accounting and logistics department noticed that the hospital's requests for food, rubber gloves, toilet paper, and surgical equipment suddenly went way, way up. The food and surgical tools would disappear, the trash would get hauled away, yet it was unclear how they were being used. At one point in 2002, the accounting department estimated the logistical increase represented a whopping discrepancy of thousands of patients.
One accountant--called Annie in the Falun Gong literature on the scandal--was aware of the supply mystery, but what concerned her far more was the behavior of her husband, a surgeon at Sujiatun. On the surface, the couple was doing fine. He was bringing home increasingly large amounts of cash, and his job appeared secure. The hospital had even issued him a dedicated cell-phone, which would ring at odd hours and send him back to Sujiatun. Yet when he came home to bed, he had violent nightmares and would wake bathed in sweat. During the day, he was constantly on edge, preoccupied, even fearful of his wife's touch.
It took a year, but eventually he confessed to her: The accounting staff was right. There were extra "patients" in the subterranean depths of the hospital, and some makeshift operating rooms down there, too. When his cell phone rang, it meant that a "patient" had been wheeled in and given a small dose of anesthesia (the hospital had a limited supply). Then he and the other doctors--some hired from the outside, each with a specialty, all constantly on call--would come in and remove the patient's kidneys, skin tissue, corneas, and other organs, seemingly to order. The remains of the "patient" would then be carried down to the old boiler, which doubled as an incinerator. The workers who disposed of the bodies--sometimes still alive--helped themselves to the occasional watch, necklace, or ring as a kind of tip.
The "patients"--men and women, old and young--were all Falun Gong practitioners. It was so much easier that way--no arrest warrants, no need for paper work. If a diagnosis had to be stipulated for some reason, the entry read "mentally destroyed," and the cause of death "suicide." The doctors' silence was bought with generous financial rewards, the assurance that they were simply "cleansing" for the party, and the vague threat implicit in the observation that if you had already done some of these operations then what difference would a few more make? Buck up!
The hospital is still operating, but the Falun Gong "patients" are apparently gone. The Chinese Communist party denies, of course, that they ever were there. More interesting, a recent U.S. consular visit found no cause for concern.
The first account of the horrors at Sujiatun was provided by a Chinese reporter now in hiding in the United States, with whom I spoke briefly. He claims to have many sources, some of whom he paid, as is common in China.
As for Annie, I interviewed her for ten minutes on April 20, after her first, rather chaotic, public appearance. She spoke at a rally at McPherson Square, a few blocks from the White House, to protest human rights abuses in China. Although our interview was hardly the six-hour session that I wanted, we were alone, apart from an interpreter, and could look each other in the eye. My strong impression was not of a Falun Gong devotee put up to a stunt, but of a classic accidental witness: pale, open-eyed, conscientious, and somewhat bewildered by Washington--a beautiful doctor's wife sitting in the back of a van, telling the most explosive story in recent Chinese history.
It must be noted that there are discrepancies between the Chinese reporter's account and Annie's. For example, he called Sujiatun a concentration camp at one point and spoke darkly of barbed wire and massive underground civil defense tunnels allegedly connected to the hospital. Annie portrayed Sujiatun as a regular hospital with a basement large enough to hold thousands of Falun Gong prisoners.
The U.S. State Department states that its "officers were allowed to tour the entire facility and grounds and found no evidence that the site is being used for any function other than as a normal public hospital." And for those who point out that you couldn't clean up Auschwitz in three weeks--the time that elapsed between the publication of the story and the consular visit--the matter ends there.
But, given the political sensitivities involved, particularly during a summit, I still have questions. Anyone who has lived in China knows that three weeks is a long time by Chinese construction standards. Is the State Department certain its officers toured an unaltered facility? Did they take an architect with them? Collect forensic samples? Sift through ashes? Interview any hospital personnel privately, off-site? And on their tour, did they reject the company of the inevitable CCP handler or hospital operative? If the answer to these questions is no, then the Americans' findings are interesting but hardly dispositive. The visitors could easily have missed a walled-off underground facility.
Experts have also pointed out that the Sujiatun hospital is prohibited by its legal classification from performing organ transplants in the first place. Yet Annie spoke of organ harvesting, not transplants. In any case, in the new entrepreneurial China, organ transplants at hospitals of a similar classification have been reported on Chinese state-controlled television, apparently without repercussions.
These are all legitimate areas for inquiry--which is difficult in surveillance-rich China. Certainly, investigating Sujiatun would place any Beijing-based media bureau on a collision course with the CCP. No wonder Sujiatun has so far been covered in depth only by the Epoch Times, the same paper that acquired a press pass for Wang Wenyi. It has numerous Falun Gong practitioners on its staff and has become a magnet for Chinese dissidents of many stripes. Like the Jewish papers that published the first accounts of the Holocaust, the Epoch Times and the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong have made this story their own.
Over the last month, Kevin Yang, a director of the latter group, has led a team making phone calls to hospitals in Tianjin, Shanghai, Shandong Province, and elsewhere in China posing as transplant candidates searching for organs. They made some 80 phone calls, and struck pay dirt at seven different hospitals. Recordings of the incriminating conversations were played for the press on April 18. They would be hard to script. Here are highlights from two of the phone conversations, translated by Yang's team:
Zhongshan Hospital, affiliated with Fudan University in Shanghai, March 16, 2006:
Q: I have to have a fresh and healthy kidney. And it should be alive. You are not going to give me a kidney from a dead person, are you?
A: Of course we will give you a good kidney, how could we give you a bad one?
Q: . . . Do you have ones from people who practice Falun Gong? I heard that they provide very good ones.
A: All that we have here are of this type.
Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, March 30, 2006:
Q: . . . Do live transplants, for example, use organs from live people who practice Falun Gong?
A: Sure.
Q: At your place, for example, prisoners, like those who practice Falun Gong, can you guarantee enough live supplies from such people?
A: Yes, sure! When it's convenient for you, come over and discuss the details.
Now, given that many Chinese are consummate salesmen, could some of the responses be construed as simply attempts to please the customer? Perhaps. But the calls also turned up an unexpected timeline. Repeatedly, hospital representatives urged the potential customers to come in April when supplies would be plentiful, and got nervous when customers asked about May. Independently, unnamed sources in China have told the Epoch Times that after its story appeared on March 10, party authorities gave the hospitals until May 1 to end the practice (or at least make it untraceable).
Finally, Yang's team also placed a call to the workers in the boiler room of the Sujiatun hospital. The call confirmed that they burned bodies and had watches to sell.
If it is true that imprisoned practitioners of Falun Gong are being murdered for their organs in China, a remaining question is the scale of the practice. The number of Falun Gong practitioners in custody is disputed; estimates by the Chinese dissident community range from 235,000 to one million or more. An unnamed military doctor from the mainland told Epoch Times that Sujiatun is one of 36 such facilities, created following the directive of Liu Jing, China's former deputy minister of public security, to "stamp out" Falun Gong "before the Olympic Games in 2008." And for several years now, rumors have circulated on the mainland of a death camp in Xinjiang capable of holding 50,000 Falun Gong practitioners.
Personally, I fear the worst. One reason is that the Chinese authorities have always handled Falun Gong with a peculiar vehemence, even in comparison with other enemies of the CCP. When Falun Gong was declared illegal on July 21, 1999, ancient sound trucks drove around Beijing to make sure that no one missed the point. That's unusual. At the time, I was working in Chinese television, and I remember the day well. Several of my Chinese colleagues began laughing nervously and buried their faces in their hands, muttering that they had not seen such a thing since the Cultural Revolution. Since then, Falun Gong participants have regularly disappeared, with no arrest record, nothing but an assigned number, leaving them particularly vulnerable.
But the main reason I'm pessimistic is the money. Organ transplants are a profitable business. Until recently, a website out of Shenyang carried a price list for organ transplant operations in English to attract foreign customers, with a kidney transplant going for $62,000. And there is precedent; it is indisputable that the Chinese Communist party has sanctioned the sale of body parts from executed prisoners. As a former Beijing business consultant, I am familiar with the peculiar combination of state directive and entrepreneurial acumen pervasive in the New China. A directive comes from on high. The money is made down below. If the CCP orders tracking software, say, installed in Internet cafés across China, the local police will sell a version for $200 a pop, and every café had better purchase a copy. The May 1 shutdown will also be familiar to anyone who follows micropatterns of counterfeit enforcement in China. Chinese SWAT teams do not swoop down on illicit factories, even the ones that make fake Johnson & Johnson baby oil that causes skin rashes. Instead, plant managers are told to finish up their production runs and move their equipment elsewhere.
So I suspect that the profits from Chinese organ harvesting dwarf those of the Nazis' soap and hair-pillow-stuffing enterprises--but I also wonder whether they will prove the undoing of the CCP. Where there is money, there's a trail. Epoch Times, in a rush to get the story out, neglected to pursue that line of investigation. What if its reporters had formed a front company that had gone in and inspected the stock of potential organ donors--wired-up, spy-cam, the works--and only then released the statements of witnesses like Annie for corroboration and color? What if they had persuaded Congress to order U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept financial transaction statements and monitor train and truck movements to and from the hospitals of China?
No matter--that's not how Epoch Times handled it, because that's not the way real witnesses behave. Instead, when they are ready to come forward, they feel compelled to testify. And it's not the way real people behave, either, when they believe that family, friends, and fellow congregants are being thrown into incinerators and when they see their own honorable profession grotesquely perverted. Instead, they scream bloody murder--just as Wang Wenyi did--and silently pray that someone is listening.
Ethan Gutmann is the author of Losing the New China. He has been a frequent speaker at forums organized by the Falun Gong-associated publication Epoch Times.
05/08/2006, Volume 011, Issue 32
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It's not easy being the father of the Chinese Internet. Children are running by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty cafe on the shore of Qinghai Lake, speaking in a low voice of the crackdown. "What is better? Big brother Internet? Or no Internet at all?" Michael asks.
Michael was hired in 1996 by the Chinese government and Global One (a Sprint-France Telecom-Deutsche Telekom joint venture) to build the first network in China providing public access to the Internet. One day sticks in his mind. The Chinese engineers working with him suddenly convened a special meeting, demanding to know if it would be possible to do keyword searching inside e-mails and web addresses on the Chinese Internet. Not really, Michael replied; all information that travels the Net is broken up into little packets. It's hard to "sniff" packets of information, particularly coded packets. You would need to intercept packets as they travel, and then there's the problem of collating the information they contain, actually making sense of it. Yes, yes, they said, but can you do it? On the third go-round, it dawned on Michael that his fellow computer geeks wanted to end the meeting, too. But at a higher level, someone required assurance. Before Internet construction proceeded further, they would need to monitor what Chinese users did with it. For the engineers, this was just cover-your-ass stuff. As long as the foreigner assured them that down the road the Chinese would be able to build an Internet firewall against the world and conduct surveillance on its own citizens, the engineers could continue working with him. Yes, yes, it can be done, Michael told them, and they went back to work.
Americans make dreams, and every generation carries new ones to China. Since 1979 that dream has been the fall of the Chinese Communist party and the rise of the world's largest market, an event that U.S. businessmen and China hands keep predicting is on the horizon or even imminent. Yet Michael was not naive. He understood the self-serving nature of much of the democracy-is-just-around-the-corner rhetoric. Working inside, he sensed the Chinese leadership's true motives in building an Internet. One of his friends, Peter Lovelock, author of the "Made For China Internet Update," puts it this way: "These are Marxists. Control the means of communication; embrace the means of communication. Fill it with Chinese voices. If they can block the outside, and block relationships between Chinese forces, no one will listen."
But for Michael, any reservations over complicity with Chinese government objectives were outweighed by a bedrock faith in the Internet's ingenious architecture. A system created to relay U.S. command messages over a damaged network after sustaining a Soviet nuclear strike could surely find a way to get messages through, securely, amid the white noise of millions of Chinese users. Resistance would be futile--even the Chinese Borg could not stop it. With the genie of free speech out of the bottle, it would just be a matter of time before those predictions of democracy in China come true.
That vision has now been called into question, not by a failure of the Internet's architecture, but in several cases, by a failure of American corporate values. Let's start where Michael left off, with the expansion of the Chinese Internet. I treated a top Chinese engineer (who wishes to remain anonymous) to a 30-course imperial meal in Beijing. As hoped, the shark's fin soup loosened his tongue--on the subject of Cisco Systems. In the United States, Cisco is known (among other things) for building corporate firewalls to block viruses and hackers. In China, the government had a unique problem: how to keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive websites, now and forever.
The way to do it would be this: If a Chinese user tried to view a website outside China with political content, such as CNN.com, the address would be recognized by a filter program that screens out forbidden sites. The request would then be thrown away, with the user receiving a banal message: "Operation timed out." Great, but China's leaders had a problem: The financial excitement of a wired China quickly led to a proliferation of eight major Internet service providers (ISPs) and four pipelines to the outside world. To force compliance with government objectives--to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome--they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale. According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator, and firewall box specially designed for the government's telecom monopoly. At approximately $20,000 a box, China Telecom "bought many thousands" and IBM arranged for the "high-end" financing. Michael confirms: "Cisco made a killing. They are everywhere."
Cisco does not deny its success in China. Nor does it deny that it may have altered its products to suit the special needs of the Chinese "market"--a localization scheme the company avoided elsewhere in the world--but it categorically rejects any responsibility for how the government uses its firewall boxes. David Zhou, a systems engineer manager at Cisco, Beijing, told me flat out, "We don't care about the [Chinese government's] rules. It's none of Cisco's business." I replied that he has a point: It's not the gun but the way it's used, and how can a company that builds firewalls be expected to, well, not build firewalls? Zhou relaxed, then confidently added that the capabilities of Cisco's routers can be used to intercept information and to conduct keyword searches: "We have the capability to look deeply into the packet." He admitted that Cisco is under the direct scrutiny of State Security, the Public Security Bureau, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
Does Cisco allow the PLA to look into packets? Zhou didn't know or wouldn't say. But consider, for example, the arrest of veteran activist Chi Shouzhu last April. He was picked up in a crowded train station minutes after printing out online materials promoting Chinese democracy. Incidents such as this have mushroomed in China, suggesting that Cisco may not be the only one capable of looking deeply into the packets. In fact, Cisco's ability to thrive in China may well depend on cooperation with the Public Security Bureau and the PLA.
Cisco's firewall has proven to be far from foolproof. New sites on forbidden topics crop up daily, and with the proliferation of ISPs who just want more subscribers surfing, the lag time between updating the government's list of banned sites and implementation can be erratic. So Chinese security organs also needed to control the search engines through which new sites can be found.
Enter Yahoo! The business press has painted a picture of a thriving, home-grown Chinese market for portals and search engines--mirroring such companies as AOL, Google, and Excite--with names like Sohu, Netease, and Sina fighting for the top spots. Chinese Yahoo!, the American outrider, trails in fifth place. A top Yahoo! representative spoke to me on the condition that I would not use his name or give identifying details other than that he had recently left the company. He admitted that Yahoo! is actually the most popular portal in China by a mile. Management had fudged the hit rate, because "we were viewed as extremely aggressive. We were seen as too foreign."
Chinese xenophobia has led many other U.S. companies to play similar games, but Yahoo! was particularly eager to please. All Chinese chat rooms or discussion groups have a "big mama," a supervisor for a team of censors who wipe out politically incorrect comments in real time. Yahoo! handles things differently. If in the midst of a discussion you type, "We should have nationwide multiparty elections in China!!" no one else will react to your comment. How could they? It appears on your screen, but only you and Yahoo!'s big mama actually see your thought crime. After intercepting it and preventing its transmission, Mother Yahoo! then solicitously generates a friendly e-mail suggesting that you cool your rhetoric--censorship, but with a New Age nod to self-esteem.
The former Yahoo! rep also admitted that the search phrase "Taiwan independence" on Chinese Yahoo! would yield no results, because Yahoo! has disabled searches for select keywords, such as "Falun Gong" and "China democracy." Search for VIP Reference, a major overseas Chinese dissident site, and you will get a single hit, a government site ripping it to shreds. How did Yahoo! come up with these policies? He replied, "It was a precautionary measure. The State Information Bureau was in charge of watching and making sure that we complied. The game is to make sure that they don't complain." By this logic, when Yahoo! rejected an attempt by Voice of America to buy ad space, they were just helping the Internet function smoothly. The former rep defended such censorship: "We are not a content creator, just a medium, a selective medium." But it is a critical medium. The Chinese government uses it to wage political campaigns against Taiwan, Tibet, and America. And of course the great promise of the Internet in China was supposed to be that it was unfettered, not selective. The Yahoo! rep again: "You adjust. The crackdowns come in waves; it's just the issue du jour. It's normal."
But what is "normal" in China can be altered under duress. When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software's underlying source codes--the keys to encryption--as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands. Theoretically, China's desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists who wired it similar leverage. Instead, the leverage all seems to have remained with the government, as Western companies fell all over themselves bidding for its favor. AOL, Netscape Communications, and Sun Microsystems all helped disseminate government propaganda by backing the China Internet Corporation, an arm of the state-run Xinhua news agency.
Not to be outdone, Sparkice, a Canadian Internet colossus, splashily announced that it would serve up only state-sanctioned news on its website. Nortel provides software for voice and closed-circuit camera recognition--technology that the Public Security Bureau has already put to good use, according to the Chinese press. AOL is quietly weighing the pros and cons of informing on dissidents if the Public Security Bureau so requests; the right decision would clearly speed Chinese approval for AOL to offer Internet services and perhaps get a foothold in the Chinese television market. In fact, AOL signed a landmark deal with a Chinese station at the end of October. Smaller American companies and smaller nations smell the blood. Along with Chinese officials, they dominate Chinese Internet-security trade shows. China Telecom is considering purchasing software from iCognito, an Israeli company that invented a program called "artificial content recognition," which surfs along just ahead of you, learning as it censors in real time. It was built to filter "gambling, shopping, job search, pornography, stock quotes, or other non-business material," but the first question from the Chinese buyers is invariably: Can it stop Falun Gong?
In the wake of terrorist attacks on America, some of the byplay between Beijing and its entrepreneurial suitors has taken on new significance. According to James Mulvenon of Rand Corporation, Network Associates, a U.S. web security firm, gained entry to the Chinese market by helpfully donating 300 live computer viruses to the Public Security Bureau. The U.S. embassy has already monitored the picture.exe virus, which worms into a user's computer and then quietly sabotages the widely available encryption software Pretty Good Privacy by sending the personal encryption keys to China. Last August's notorious Code Red worm, which some thought originated in China, appears to have been little more than an amateur nuisance. But Chinese military reports on unconventional warfare explicitly advocate coordinated virus attacks to debilitate U.S. communication and financial systems during a crisis. America may expect a more sophisticated visit from the offspring of a Network Associates sample virus in the future.
Why has there been so little oversight of such corporate activity? As Michael Robinson puts it, for the first four years of the Net era, those with paranoid visions of China's government were never quite able to square their suspicions with the rapid expansion of the Chinese Internet. Although it was widely rumored in Beijing that up to 30,000 state security employees were monitoring the Internet in that city alone, the monitoring was also laughed at. Apparently the bureaucrats liked monitoring pornography so much that they had a massive backlog. State security was said to be lax, corrupt, full of holes. Chinese whiz kids could still surf through the firewall and beyond. Associations could flourish among the patrons of the cybercaf s, using anonymous monikers. Many saw the Internet as a populist river leading to the ocean of the global community. Then, the Chinese government abruptly built a cyber-version of the Three Gorges Dam.
In October 2000, the State Council ordered Internet Service Providers to hold all Chinese user data--phone numbers, time, and surfing history--for at least 60 days. In November, commercial news sites were banned. In December, the National People's Congress decreed all unauthorized online political activity illegal. January 2001 saw the criminalization of Internet transfer of "state secret information," such as reports of human rights violations. February brought "Internet Police 110," software blocking "cults, sex, and violence" while monitoring users' attempts to access such sites. By March, the surveillance started to work; hundreds of e-mails on the controversy surrounding a schoolhouse bombing in Jiangxi disappeared. Around the same time, Chinese authorities announced near completion of a "black box" to collect all information flowing across the Internet. In April, arrests of democracy activists using the web and a nationwide crackdown on cybercaf s reached critical mass. Surviving caf s had to install internal monitoring software. E-mail to Tibet now took three days to get through, if at all, and Falun Gong e-mail was completely eradicated. By October 2001, when President George W. Bush flew to Shanghai for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, he was entering an Internet police state. To deflect criticism, but perhaps also as a demonstration of power, blocks on U.S. news websites were magically lifted by Chinese authorities. The minute Bush went airborne, the blocks were back in place. During Bush's current visit to China, any attempt to discuss loosening Chinese Internet controls is likely to be brushed aside using the rhetoric of our own struggle against terrorism (what, you're against surveillance?). But if the Chinese take this tack, they are of course being dishonest about their own motives.
There were urgent reasons for the Chinese Internet crackdown; fighting terrorism wasn't one of them. Instead, look to the slow-motion crisis of a leadership transition, the release of the Tiananmen papers, the emergence of a cyber-Falun Gong, and a stirring--you could feel it on the street--for greater freedom of expression, if not genuine democracy. Then again, there may be a more elaborate game afoot. Chairman Mao knew the utility of briefly loosening controls to create a dragnet. In effect, the current Chinese leadership promoted a "hundred flowers" period of relative Internet freedom--again, not to capture terrorists, but to expose anyone who disagreed with the legitimacy of their rule and to attract massive Western investment. American technologies of surveillance, encryption, firewalls, and viruses have now been transferred to Chinese partners--and might even one day be turned against our own ludicrously open Internet. We funded, built, and pushed into China what we thought was a Trojan Horse, but we forgot to build the hatch.
Consider a Chinese user in search of an unblocked news site (weeklystandard.com, for example). He won't expect to get through, and if he does, it will be cause for alarm, for the site may be a tripwire--not for spam, but for state security. Everything he does on the web might conceivably be used against him. Pornography? Potentially, a two-year sentence. Political? Possible permanent loss of career, family, and freedom. E-mail may be the most risky: Two years ago, working from my office in a Chinese TV studio, I received an e-mail from a U.S. friend (in a browser-based Hotmail account, no less, which in theory should be difficult to monitor) with the words "China," "unrest," "labor," and "Xinjiang" in queer half-tone brackets, as if the words had been picked out by a filter. I now realize that it was a warning; any savvy Chinese user would have sensed it instantly.
Before the crackdown one could escape and surf anonymously in a cybercaf or use a proxy server--another computer that acts as an intermediary between surfers and websites, helping to hide their web footprints and evade the filters. Not surprisingly, the most common search words in China were not "Britney" and "hooters," but "free" and "proxy." Fully 10 percent of Chinese users--about two million people--used proxies regularly in an attempt to circumvent government controls. In what Michael calls "the first sign of cleverness" by the government, a proxy pollution campaign began last spring when the Chinese authorities either developed or imported a system that sniffs the networks for signs of proxies. A user, frantically typing in proxy addresses until he finds one that isn't blocked, effectively provides the government with a tidy blacklist. After a few of these tedious sessions, many of my Chinese friends simply gave up climbing over the firewall. For a small fee, expat users could turn to a web-based proxy browser, such as Anonymizer. But credit cards are effectively blocked for Chinese citizens. Just for good measure, Anonymizer was finally blocked as well.
IS CHINA'S Internet beyond redemption? Is it destined to be a tool of surveillance and repression, managed by the Chinese government and serviced by cynical Western partners? Maybe not. The Great Firewall might be vulnerable to a few physicists at the University of Oregon. I spent a day watching Stephen Hsu diagram the Chinese web and its weaknesses. Hsu and his company, SafeWeb, have developed a proxy server system called Triangle Boy. The triangle refers to the Chinese user, to a fleet of servers outside of the firewall, and to a mothership which the servers report to, but the Chinese government cannot find. Already tens of thousands of Chinese users have connected with it; five of the top twenty Triangle Boy search sites are in the Chinese language. Every day, the Chinese user receives an e-mail listing new addresses of Triangle Boy servers, which allow the user to visit websites that they would otherwise be unable to reach. Because the addresses of the servers change constantly, the system is practically unbeatable. Any attack, especially on the mothership, requires enormous resources.
But as surely as Triangle Boy works to liberate the surfing Chinese masses, you can bet State Security is looking for a way to pounce on this latest proxy rebellion. The simplest one will be to enlist American companies, still eager to curry favor in Beijing, and get them to develop software allowing the Public Security Bureau to sniff out and block proxies as quickly as they are created.
The only practical solution to this puzzle is for the Bush administration to make Internet freedom in China a high priority. At the moment it is a laughably small priority. The Voice of America, whose website has been a high-profile target of Chinese blocking, last summer began funding Triangle Boy to the tune of $10,000 per month. VOA officials undertook that small effort in frustration; they attempt to send daily news via e-mail to some 800,000 addresses in China, with no guarantee that they are getting through. Hsu estimates that supplying one million Chinese users with Triangle Boy (approximately 600 million page views a month) would require just $1 million annually. Budgeted at $300 million a year, VOA has the means and is wisely looking at several other solutions as well. But for VOA to justify an anti-blocking effort on a scale that will make a difference, it will need to be seen as carrying out an important plank of American foreign policy, not just acting on the margins as it is now.
And why not make this a higher profile U.S. policy? Cracking the Chinese firewall is at least as technically interesting as strategic defense. Triangle Boy is still theoretically vulnerable to spoof sites, authorization problems, or a Code Red-style worm attacking the servers. That implies a need for a highly technical layering operation, involving an endless and ever-changing supply of low-key web-based proxies, mirror sites, and encrypted e-mail and instant messenger services in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, in sufficient volume to overwhelm the Chinese firewall.
Creative engineers, unleashed to solve the problem of bringing Internet freedom to China, might take any number of approaches. They might go through Hong Kong, where illicit cables are said to run to Guangzhou. They might cut some deals with a "loose" Chinese ISP, such as Jitong. They might use messages formatted as images to defeat software that sniffs out characters. They might exploit the fact that Chinese Internet addresses were originally configured in peculiar blocks. Or the fact that the government's proxy-hunters come from only a few locations. A shrewd native engineer could probably root out and defeat 99 percent of these government agents.
None of these measures will be cheap. Nor can we expect the U.S. government to fully manage such a multi-pronged private-and-public defense of Internet freedom. Even if they back the overall concept, administration officials will inevitably want deniability about certain parts of such an operation. This means the project will need to attract the support of foundations, human rights groups, religious organizations--any group that cares about a free China.
But it will be worth it. Given the willingness of capitalists to work hand in hand with the Chinese regime, the Internet may be the only force left that is potentially anti-hierarchical. Think of it as a way to levy a web-based democracy tax on the Chinese government. Think of it also as a way around the university students and the intelligentsia, who are overrated as agents for democratic change in China.
As the father of the Chinese Internet Michael Robinson notes, "In the Chinese Internet's infancy, the first three sites that the government blocked were two anti-government sites--and one Maoist site. What threatens them? . . . The heartland." Ultimately, it won't be the intellectuals who are key to bringing democracy to China. Irate overtaxed peasants with Internet-enabled cell phones ten years from now are the real target market. And those whose dream is democracy in China are operating with diminishing points of entry. The American business presence in China is deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised as an agent for liberalizing change. The Internet remains the strongest force for democracy available to the Chinese people. But it remains a mere potentiality, yet another American dream, unless we first grapple with the question: Who lost China's Internet? Well, we did. But we can still repair the damage. We can, in Michael's words, "lay down the communication network for revolution." If we don't, his progeny may not forgive us.
Ethan Gutmann, a visiting fellow at the Project for the New American Century, is completing a book, "Beijing Boot Camp."
02/25/2002, Volume 007, Issue 23
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