China's Internet at 30
Some reflections on my years watching the development of the Chinese internet
This year marks the 30th anniversary of China’s first internet connection, which took place on April 20, 1994, between the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing (IHEP) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. Two years later, right around the time I moved to China, my father pulled some strings and managed to get an internet connection for the family home on Yangrou Hutong in Beijing.
My email address was a long alphanumeric string — gibberish@public.bta.net.cn. Cumbersome, yes, but it conferred bragging rights only a few years later, like New Yorkers with 212 area codes or Beijingers with that coveted 1390 prefix to their mobile numbers. Slow dial-up connections may have been the norm at the time in the States, where people were still just making their way off of Prodigy and Compuserve and over onto the World Wide Web opened up to them by the Mosaic browser, Netscape Navigator and, of course, AOL, but to those of us in China in those days the U.S. was still blazing fast. Before 1999, when ADSL connections became available for private residences, I made it a point to only try logging on only with a book to hand, so I could read a chapter or two while a webpage loaded.
That year, I joined an internet company called ChinaNow.com as the world’s least qualified editor-in-chief. I loved my years there for many reasons, among them the fact that my work put me in proximity to individuals who would go on to create some of China’s most iconic internet companies. At the turn of the millennium, many of these future titans were still just getting started, and while uniformly ambitious they weren’t at all inaccessible: Charles Zhang, who founded Sohu, Jack Ma, Victor Koo (who would start Youku), Robin Li who later founded Baidu, Shao Yibo — Bo Shao — who sold his auction company Eachnet to eBay, Gary Wang of Tudou, and many others in that early crop of entrepreneurs would all be at the same conferences, and at dinners I was fortunate enough to have occasionally attended.
When ChinaNow folded in 2002, I was able to combine my editorial experience and my connections in what, by then, was a dense ecosystem of tech companies and parlay that into good freelance strings and eventually full-time work, writing on tech and telecoms in China. From there, I went on to communications positions first with Youku and then Baidu, from 2009 through mid-2016.
Watching the internet blossom in China was exhilarating, as anyone who was living in China in the first decade of this century can attest. It created a huge, boisterous public sphere where none previously existed — huge, boisterous, or otherwise. The word “netizen,” though coined first in English, quickly fell out of favor in that language except when speaking of China’s online millions. The word was embraced by many Chinese people in its direct Chinese translation: 网民 wǎngmín, precisely because being online suddenly felt like being part of a newly empowered polity — not a voiceless subject but a citizen.
Censorship at least before 2008 was comparatively light, and with the important exceptions of the websites of certain human rights and Tibet- or Taiwan-independence groups, very few websites from outside of China were blocked. More importantly, censorship on domestic Chinese websites — the all-important BBSs and forums like Tianya, the teeming blogs, and uniquely Chinese forms of social media like Douban — was, before 2008, almost unimaginably lax compared to what it’s become over the last decade. Internet cafés sprang up everywhere, then began disappearing as personal computers became affordable and connectivity improved. The age of the portals — Sina, Sohu, Netease — came to a close as the next giants, BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) took center stage. Later, wave after wave of internet and tech sector fads washed over China: video sites, P2P streaming, Facebook clones, microblogs, Groupon clones, O2O, bike sharing, and on and on, into the age of the full-blown mobile internet, with LTE and then 5G rollout.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: All of this was happening even though so many of the internet entrepreneurs were either educated in the U.S. or had been profoundly shaped by American culture and values (as was the case for a certain Americophilic English teacher from Hangzhou). All this was happening despite these entrepreneurs having secured their funding from American venture capital firms using a workaround that skirted the longstanding rule against foreign ownership in media and telecoms. And all this was happening despite their listing their shares on American markets, again using that workaround so that the listed company was not the actual entity operating in China (even though it was). More to the point, all this was happening in a country still ruled by an authoritarian party that ordinarily never allowed the commanding heights of any strategically important sector to be controlled by foreign entities. There was no question that the internet constituted a strategically important sector. But for all that time, not a single state-owned internet company was a significant player in the consumer-facing internet sector.
Why didn’t the Party exert more control in the years spanning, say, 1999 through 2012? Part of it was simply that things moved too quickly: Chinese entrepreneurs simply moved too fast and broke too many things, and the norm quickly became to ask for forgiveness rather than asking for permission. But the Party also recognized that the rapid spread of personal computers and the Internet — the two were deeply intertwined in China — created a deep reserve of technological literacy that would bring terrific benefits to China and sustain its growth by increasing productivity. “Informatization” — the clunky translation for 信息化 xìnxīhuà — became ubiquitous in the Partyspeak of the day: all enterprises were urged to embrace digitalization as part of the Hu and Wen era’s program of “Scientific Socialism.” And it wasn’t just private-sector companies that were now routinely seeking listings on American bourses: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile all listed on the NYSE — and were, as we know, compelled to delist in January 2021.
In hindsight, it was all a lot more threatening to the Party than some of us understood at the time. I was surprised when I asked my longtime business partner Jeremy Goldkorn on a recent episode of the Sinica Podcast what he would cite as the reasons why China became, beginning in the late 2000s, more internally repressive and externally assertive, and he answered mainly by talking about the internet:
Jeremy: And that year [2009], there was also the so-called YouTube or Facebook Revolution in Iran where you had an election and then popular protests that were fueled by social media
Kaiser: Yeah. After Ahmadinejad was reelected. Right?
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s right. And I think that started to provoke a sense of paranoia in the Communist Party, both about how easily it seemed to organize popular movements because of the internet, but also the fact that they’re also being an authoritarian regime, to use a word you don’t particularly like, were vulnerable to the same forces that the Iranian government was. And the same year, just a few months basically immediately following the Iran protests, you had the riots in Urumqi, deadly — race riots, essentially, where Uyghurs and Han Chinese people were…
Kaiser: Killing each other.
Jeremy: Killing each other on the streets with clubs. And that was followed by about six months of the entire internet being shut down in Xinjiang. And that felt like the start of something. And I have to say, in my own personal experience, two days before the Urumqi riots, on July the third, Danwei was blocked in China. So, whatever that means.
This is all before Google’s dramatic announcement that they would pull out of China rather than comply with censorship demands, before the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash of July 2011 showed the power of the internet to focus and amplify popular dissent, before “Brother Wristwatch” was exposed by eagle-eyed netizens for wearing his corruption on his sleeve, as it were. But all these things, and especially the Arab Spring uprisings (to which the American media helpfully affixed the names of various American social media properties) added to existing fears that, as PSB head Meng Jianzhu once wrote, “The internet has become a primary method for the anti-China forces to infiltrate us and amplify destructive energy.” There is a direct line from there to the infamous Document Number 9.
The blocking of internet sites outside of China by what’s colloquially known as the Great Firewall is what comes to mind for most people I daresay when they think of Chinese internet censorship. While that certainly does discourage or even prevent many Chinese from accessing sites outside the Firewall, it isn’t the type of censorship that most Chinese internet users ordinarily encounter. Domestic censorship is much more impactful, and frankly much more difficult to do anything about. But that distinction isn’t so important for our purposes. I’m writing from memory here, so forgive the lack of citations or data, but my distinct sense is that the two forms of censorship tended to advance and retreat in tandem, and that first became very noticeable in 2008.
In March of that year, riots broke out in Lhasa and other ethnically Tibetan regions, prompting the first wave of tightening. This seems to have manifested first with outside sites like Facebook, to which access suddenly became spotty though clearly not completely blocked from Beijing and other major metropolitan areas. But the real casualties were the news sites, with CNN and Time Magazine — Time Warner had acquired CNN in 1996 — being completely blocked, and some English-language newspapers also blocked during the early months of the year. This seems mainly to have been due to Beijing’s anger over CNN’s coverage of the riots. Recall that soon afterward, a website called AntiCNN.com was founded in Beijing by a rather stridently patriotic young man named Rao Jin. Attacks on the Olympic torch relay as it passed through France caused a heightened sense of aggrievement in China, and resulted in a boycott of the French chain Carrefour in China.
The Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan in May of 2008 also sparked anger after remarks were made by some U.S. celebrities, most notably the actress Sharon Stone, who called the Wenchuan earthquake a kind of karmic comeuppance for China’s treatment of Tibetans. Things let up a bit during the Olympics but by the end of the year page requests were routinely timing out on Google searches, Facebook was sporadically blocked, and a growing number of news sites were clearly experiencing partial if not total blocking.
Things got worse in 2009. By this time, Twitter had taken off, and clones like Jiwai.de and Fanfou were gaining popularity. (Sina’s Weibo had yet to launch, and was released only after its local competitors were taken down in July of that year). The runup to the 20th anniversary of June 4 saw Facebook finally blocked in its entirety; it was fully inaccessible by May 31 of that year. And then, when the Urumqi riots broke out in July, Twitter was blocked and its Chinese clones shuttered.
On January 12, 2010, Google VP David Drummond posted his now-famous message of defiance on Google’s official blog: Many Chinese netizens cheered, and many Party officials shuddered. At first, their reflexive accusation that Google’s decision was part of a nefarious war of “information imperialism” fell mostly on deaf ears. But then, only nine days later, on January 21, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at Washington’s Newseum about global internet freedom, speaking directly to Google’s confrontation with Chinese authorities and confirming, as Beijing saw it, what China’s leaders had long suspected: that the internet was the most potent weapon in the arsenal of liberal hegemonism. My sense, though merely anecdotal, was that people who’d applauded Google were suddenly less enthused — “I want my internet freedom as much as the next guy, but not with the big American flag planted in it, thanks.”
Of course, it’s pointless to wish that America would be less exuberant in the proclamation of its values, even when toning it down a bit might have produced better outcomes. The scorpion’s going to sting the frog every time. And to be sure, the weird about-face that America seems to have taken on its old techno-utopian beliefs — where technology went from being the surefire undoing of authoritarianism to, just a few years later, the tyrant’s faithful and deadly servant — hasn’t improved things at all. I guess the lesson is, as it usually is, we should have thought more about how our rhetoric landed on Beijing’s ear, and how threatening this idea of internet freedom actually was from Beijing’s perspective. Cognitive empathy, as always.
Last week, I brought up two arguments one frequently hears in China to explain, justify, or excuse the absence of political democracy. The same two are also deployed in defense of internet censorship in China: the suzhi argument says the “personal quality” of the Chinese masses remains too low, and that ordinary people, with only rudimentary education, would be far too gullible, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood online, and could be seduced by superstition, conspiracy theory, or foreign ideology; meanwhile, the second argument, that Chinese fear chaos, posits that anarchy is just what you’d get were the floodgates of online content controls to be suddenly flung open.
Living in America in this age of social media doesn’t exactly compel me to argue against these quite as strenuously as I once might have. And there is, I suppose, a version of these arguments to which I’ve always been partially sympathetic. We here in the U.S., after all, have had the explicit legal right to free expression since the 1790s, when it was enshrined in the First Amendment to our constitution. As novel as that idea was, it was itself still the product of a long, highly contingent historical process, and it was born in a time when information moved around only at the speed of a galloping horse and literacy rates were very low. We flung the floodgates of information freedom open 230 years ago, and we’ve had all the time since to acclimate to that reality, to internalize it, to practice living with it as communication technologies continue to advance. Yet even then, the right to free speech is something we constantly fight over, accuse one another of denying to us, and sometimes even harbor reservations about.
China, in contrast, has not only lacked any meaningful historical tradition of free speech but has, through successive governments, kept the floodgates closed — from the age of oracle bones, to brush and silk, through moveable type, telegraphy, radio, television, the internet and even now, to a time when 1.2 billion people carry with them a device capable of sending high-definition video around the world instantaneously, at least in theory. Open those floodgates now, the argument goes, you’d devastate the valley.
For a while, up through 2012, I was optimistic that at least the Party leadership was venting off some of that pressure, slowly easing the gates open, and presumably reducing the potential lethality of the waters behind it. But for the last ten years or more that’s just not been the case, and as the internet in China nears its 30th birthday, I find myself worrying about the structural integrity of the dam, and praying that the release valves aren’t rusted shut.
Images: OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com