RIGHTS-CHINA: Fire Shows Price of Internet Crackdown

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jun 18 2002 (IPS) - The love-hate relationship of China’s Communist Party with cyber-culture came to the fore this weekend, when a midnight blaze swept through a packed Internet cafe in the capital and killed more than 20 youngsters.

Battling the suffocating smoke in their attempt to escape, net surfers found the only door of the parlor locked and the windows blocked by iron bars. Witnesses suggested that the cafe manager might have locked the door to dodge random checks by the police in the latest government clampdown against the popular venues.

Fearful of attacks on their rule by subversive elements using the anonymity of the Internet, China’s rulers had tightened their hold over the Internet, launching surprise content inspections of major Chinese websites and driving many Internet outlets underground.

Some 2,200 of Beijing’s 2,400 Internet cafes have been operating illegally, the ‘China Daily’ saod on Monday. Nationwide, there are 200,000 Internet cafes and 17,000 had been shut down due to illegal activities, state media said last month.

But with millions of Chinese seeking access to the net, Internet cafes have continued to boom — behind locked doors and barred windows to avoid police scrutiny and, ignoring safety standards.

Lanjisu, the Internet cafe that trapped its young victims in the inferno, had been operating without a license from the government. Located in Haidian, the university district of Beijing, the cafe had been attracting people surfing the web for news on the World Cup or playing computer games.

“It is test season at the universities, it is hot and many of us can’t sleep until late,” said Xiao Hong, a Beijing University student who frequents the Internet cafes in Haidian. “The Internet places stay open until late and hanging out there is much cheaper than going to a bar.”

The response of Beijing’s leaders to the weekend blaze was swift but extreme — it ordered the closure of all Internet cafes in the capital, in effect admitting that a series of efforts to control the use of Internet have proved futile.

In April, the government announced its second major Internet crackdown in just over a year, banning Internet cafes from residential buildings and areas near government buildings and intensifying surveillance of web content.

The campaign aims to “clean up the Internet environment” before the five-yearly Communist Party Congress in October, state media quoted the Minster of Public Security, Jia Chunwang, as telling a public information security surveillance meeting in Beijing.

Jia vowed to clamp on all Internet crimes, which the authorities claim are threatening national security and social stability.

But as China’s communist rulers try to impose electronic firewalls and legal limits on the Internet, cyber-censors have been challenged by the government’s own promotion of high technology and e-commerce as means to propel the country’s economic growth.

Beijing’s leaders are convinced that China’s ascendance as an economic powerhouse depends on embracing the Internet. President Jiang Zemin is a staunch believer in the power of information technology and has spoken more than once in favour of China’s wiring.

The new leadership, which the 16th Party Congress it due to elect in autumn, is likely to share the same belief as it comprises technocrats such as current Vice President Hu Jintao and Vice Premier Wen Jiabao.

Reflecting the official line, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, the ‘People’s Daily’, boasted in April that “China’s Internet population has surpassed Japan’s”. The newspaper quoted the results of a survey, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, indicating that there were 56.6 million Internet users in this country of 1.2 billion people in the first quarter of 2002.

This is a dramatic leap from 22.5 million users at the end of January 2001, the paper said, rating China’s Internet population only next to the United States’ 166 million.

Those Internet users however, account only for 5.5 percent of China’s homes, as many of the net surfers cannot afford to buy a personal computer. Internet cafes, which have mushroomed in the capital and other major cities in recent years, cater to a growing Internet public, hungry for news and entertainment.

There, for as little as three yuan or forty U.S. cents an hour, young Chinese can anonymously browse any site they wish and try to outwit China’s cyber-cops in getting access to numerous blocked sites on the World Wide Web.

Despite pledges to openness in the Internet era, the Chinese government continues to block access to some Western media outlets, websites of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement and all outlets whose content is deemed politically sensitive by the Communist Party.

This is not likely to change even as the old generation of leaders steps down in the coming months. No matter how Internet-savvy China’s new leaders might be, they are bound to defend the supreme rule of Communist Party’s authority.

Likewise, the government’s recent clampdowns have shown that anyone, from democracy activists to pornographers and practitioners of Falun Gong, could be a target.

In May, China charged four intellectuals with subversion after they were detained in March for using the Internet to organise a discussion group on political reform, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

But China’s heavy-handedness in trying to control Internet, as shown in the latest incident, might frustrate government efforts to keep its image untarnished just as a leadership transition looms large in the fall. The fire at Lanjisu, which claimed 24 lives, was said to be the most serious fire in the capital in 30 years.

The incident comes on the heels of another Internet cafe blaze earlier this year. A fire that broke out in an Internet cafe in the north-eastern port city of Dalian killed 20 young people who were similarly trapped behind a locked door.