Average Chinese who usually avoid confrontation with the government are taking advantage of a public comment period of a draft Internet regulation to express their frustration with intensified blocking of foreign websites.
A government website posted the draft regulation, which would tighten oversight of Internet domain names, on March 25. While few expect officials to meaningfully change the regulation in response to what they hear, online users like Lily Wang have flocked to the site to click the “oppose” button.
The immediate issue is an article in the regulation that appears to prohibit the country’s Internet service providers from providing connections to websites in China that have domains, or Web addresses, registered abroad. The bigger concern is the government’s unrelenting effort to bolster what’s known as the Great Firewall in a way that increasingly frustrates many Chinese Internet users.
A Shanghai-based marketing executive at an international trading company who does part-time translation work, Ms. Wang says the government’s existing practice of blocking many foreign websites already makes her work tougher. When she was translating an English book about Morocco last year, she couldn’t access Wikipedia and other foreign sites to check information in the book. A series of virtual private networks she had used—software that can circumvent the firewall—had been blocked. Facing a deadline, she asked a friend in Germany to look up the information she needed and email it to her.
“I was a hipster who didn’t pay attention to politics or social issues,” says Ms. Wang, 33 years old. “The restrictions of the Great Firewall changed me.”
In a country where citizens have few chances to communicate directly with the government, users like Ms. Wang see the comment session as a rare opportunity to be heard—even if it’s ultimately futile. In apparent response to the criticism, the ministry in charge of the regulations issued a statement last week, saying that the provision in question, known as Article 37, wouldn’t lead to increased blocking of foreign sites.
Many observers in China find that hard to believe, given the way Internet controls already have gone from tight to tighter since President Xi Jinping took power in late 2012. China was the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom in the 2015 Freedom on the Net survey by Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Freedom House, compared to third and the fourth in previous years. The survey measures three aspects of a country’s Internet freedom: obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights. China scored 88 out of 100.
The list of blocked foreign websites in China is long—from Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, to SlideShare, a slide-hosting site. And it isn’t only English-language sites—Chinese versions of Google and Wikipedia were popular before they were blocked. According to Greatfire.org, which monitors online censorship in China, 138 out of 1,000 of Internet metric firm Alexa’s top domains are blocked in China.
The result is that the world’s biggest online population—632 million active users, or almost twice of entire U.S. population—is increasingly isolated from the rest of the globe. The Chinese Internet, many industry insiders and online users say, is bordering on becoming an intranet.
That has made aspects of life and work unnecessarily hard for more people beyond the pool of political dissidents and advocates who have long opposed government censorship. One Internet startup founder in Shenzhen says tech companies like his have to build their own network infrastructure to access foreign sites out of business necessity, including popular coding sites Stack Overflow and GitHub that are hard or impossible to reach in China because of the Great Firewall.
“For individuals, using VPNs to climb the Great Firewall is like paying a network tax,” he says. “For companies, having to climb the wall affects competitiveness and wastes resources.”
It is unclear how many online users have voted against the article in question. The Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council says because the comment period is ongoing, it doesn’t know the number yet. A spokesman declined to say whether the agency will disclose the numbers when the session ends. It hasn’t done so after previous comment sessions.
Hal Hao, a 40-year-old executive at a big insurance company in Beijing, is among those who are increasingly fed up. He was reminded of the limitations again this week, after the so-called “Panama Papers” were leaked and he couldn’t read coverage about offshore assets allegedly controlled by relatives of China’s top Communist Party officials. The topic has been heavily censored on the Chinese Internet.
Mr. Hao says he registered his opposition against Article 37 because he’s worried that his son will grow up in a closed society. He says he misses Google—which hasn’t been accessible in China since 2010—because he used it to search information for work and general knowledge of the world. Through Google Maps he found where the river in his hometown starts. He used Google Street View to explore a string of islands in Norway.
“I felt I was given the eyes of God,” he says in an email. “If you wanted to learn, Google was able to open a window into the whole world for you. It was like an enlightenment to me.”http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-voice-frustration-over-great-firewall-1459973164
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