Title: Roundtable - China And The Internet | China In The Red | FRONTLINE | PBS
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Content: Indeed, China has the most extensive Internet censorship in the world, more effective even than Saudi Arabia's according to a December 2002 study by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The authors found that of 200,000 websites they tried to access, fully 50,000 were inaccessible from China on at least one occasion. While the authors note that the filtering was inconsistent -- for example, a site might be blocked to users in one geographic area but not in another -- they say it could be due to a delay in updating the "block lists" in certain regions. They also noted that there was a "documentable leap" in the sophistication of China's Internet filters beginning in September 2002. ( Recent articles and an Amnesty International report have pointed out that North American companies -- including Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, and Websense -- have provided important technologies that help the Chinese government censor the Web.) In addition, according to various reports, the Chinese authorities have been able to cut the average life of a proxy server -- which allows users to surreptitiously access sites that the government has blocked -- to approximately 15-30 minutes, a mere fraction what it used to be. As the government grows more adept at censoring the Internet, many have cast doubt on the potential of China's Internet "revolution." A working paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace maintains that China's experience has defied the traditional wisdom that the Internet is a "democratizing" technology. In addition to the government's "reactive" efforts to control the Internet -- not only censoring or blocking websites, but also monitoring chatrooms and closing thousands of Internet cafes -- the authors write that the Chinese leadership has also developed "proactive" ways to reinforce its propaganda. The government, for instance, set up websites to present its official views on various events, such as the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by the U.S. during the 1999 war over Kosovo, and its reaction to the U.S. spy plane incident on Hainan Island in 2001.