With new polls underscoring the continuation of a long-standing lack of basic knowledge between the populations of two of the world’s biggest powers, it seems only appropriate to lay out a few basic facts to ground any ensuing argument. As of May 1st of this year, there are over 404 million internet users in the People’s Republic of China, despite the limitations to access imposed on the Xinjiang/East Turkestan region, giving China the largest online population of any country. Within a year of the release of Charter 08, a vocal call for democracy and governmental reform signed by 300 mainland Chinese intellectuals, 70 of the signatories had been detained or interrogated.
The combination of a massive online populace and a historically repressive government makes China’s new plan to “end anonymous online comments,” announced Friday in a speech by director of the State Council Information Office director Wang Chen, all the more worrisome. While the stated directive to prevent “overseas hostile forces from infiltrating through the Internet," is decidedly vague, in the past, such obtuse language has been used to allow for four different types of detention. While the speech itself made no mention of which groups are targeted under the program, it is aimed at attacking pornography, gambling, fraud and ‘other offenses’ (a term almost as maddeningly obscure as ‘state secrets’). This speech came only a day after an announcement that Beijing had decided to reinforce a law that requires internet and telecommunications companies to inform on customers who divulge ‘state secrets’, one of the most contentious terms in current Chinese politics, suggesting a shift towards an overall stronger strategy on the part of a government already internationally recognized as an enemy of the internet.
Detailed in this speech were the three facets of this new directive, all aimed at further regulating an already oppressively regulated Internet. The first proposed step is to “regulate the management of domain names, IP addresses, registrations and access services,” a goal set back in February when the government set up a policy requiring new IP address purchasers to present identification. The second part of the plan is to “establish an entrance and exit mechanism for Internet information services”. And the third is to “introduce an Internet real-name system actively.” While this last step would only apply to administrators for news and commercial sites and put an end to the anonymous comment sections of news sites, it would, at least theoretically not touch other sites (deemed not as risqué as the news). With these new regulations in place and the world’s biggest population of online users, China seems poised to come down harder than ever on Internet users. In fact, in the last year alone China arrested 5,510 suspects for the kinds of online crimes they claim this new program targets. Now if all of these new documentation tools are actually placed in their arsenal, it seems that some of the concern over the other ways the Chinese government may be monitoring the online dissident community would be overrun.