Against the backdrop of a mushrooming corruption scandal publicized almost entirely over the Internet, China announced a sweeping new secrecy law Wednesday that criminalizes the spread of unapproved news and information in cyberspace.
The restrictions, issued by the State Secrets Bureau, were retroactively dated to Jan. 1. They specifically prohibit the use of chat rooms, e-mail or Web sites to discuss or post any information pertaining to “state secrets.”
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Because Chinese law does not define what is and what is not a state secret–that is the job of the State Secrets Bureau–the new rules give the authorities broad powers to clamp down on anyone posting content that does not meet with its specific approval.
The law also requires government authorization for the posting of news or information that hasn’t been published in official state media.
State secrecy laws have been used in the past to convict journalists, academics and political activists who have acquired information the government deems sensitive.
Whether or not it will be possible to enforce the restrictions at a time of skyrocketing Internet use in China is questionable. The most recent statistics put the number of people on-line at 8.9 million, more than twice the number a year ago. Meanwhile, the Internet’s influence has soared as an alternative source of news, information and debate forbidden in China’s non-cyber world.
Nothing has highlighted that growth more than the corruption scandal unfolding around the southern port city of Xiamen, where dozens of Communist Party officials have been implicated in a smuggling racket.
Details began circulating on the Internet late last year and were picked up and confirmed by Hong Kong and Western media. Those reports have in turn been circulated and posted on Internet sites, stirring further interest.
There has barely been a mention of the scam in the Chinese press, but virtually everyone, at least in major cities, seems to know about it, reflecting the Internet’s capacity to serve as a force multiplier of the actual number of users, as friends of friends who know someone with access to the Internet exchange the latest information.
A high-level investigation into the alleged racket has been under way since last year, spearheaded by Premier Zhu Rongji as part of the leadership’s drive to combat rampant smuggling along China’s borders, party officials have confirmed.
Corruption cases typically are reported in the Chinese press only after they have been concluded. Some similar, but smaller, cases were cracked last year and trumpeted in the media as evidence of the government’s commitment to the war against corruption.
In this instance the scam was too big to keep under wraps. Dozens of officials reportedly are under arrest. Sums as high as $20 billion may have been involved, according to some reports in Hong Kong newspapers. Moreover, the investigation seemed to implicate the wife of Beijing party boss Jia Qinglin, a senior Politburo member with close ties to President Jiang Zemin.
On Wednesday, the government took the unusual step of denying the reports that Jia’s wife was implicated–something that had appeared within China only on the Internet.
There is no evidence of a direct link between the corruption scandal and the imposition of the new restrictions. But the exposure of the Xiamen case underscores the very real threat that the medium poses to the Communist Party’s ability to dictate what its citizens know and do not know.
“The Internet makes it impossible for the government to hide,” said Dali Yang, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “They want to control the pace and they don’t want to be upstaged by the Internet, which has certainly happened in this case.”
Because the authorities typically keep investigations secret, the Xiamen case would fall into the category of a “state secret,” Yang said. Indeed, some of the earliest Internet reports seemed detailed and authoritative enough to suggest insider leaks, perhaps from frustrated investigators or Chinese journalists who were denied the opportunity to publish their findings.
The restrictions may be aimed as much at curbing the Internet’s role as an outlet for official leaks as at the broader use of the Internet by ordinary citizens, Yang said.
Yet the fact that the Chinese government is even trying to suppress the Internet highlights the Communist Party’s nervousness about its implications, said Joseph Cheng, a professor of political science at Hong Kong University.
“On the one hand, the leaders accept the fact of globalization because they see it as inevitable and they want China to prosper. But globalization also means freedom of information, which will destabilize China’s regime,” he said.
“So how do you embrace the economic benefits of globalization but weed out the political aspects? It’s a tremendous dilemma.”
In some ways, the law will make little difference to the existing situation.
Portals physically based in China already monitor their own chat rooms, employing staffers to sit in on discussions and zap any comments deemed too sensitive.
They also are forbidden to post unauthorized news sources. The government blocks access to many overseas sites deemed sensitive, including The New York Times, CNN and all sites pertaining to Taiwan, Tibet or human-rights issues.
The authorities eavesdrop on the e-mails of suspected dissidents, and transcripts of e-mail exchanges have been used to convict pro-democracy activists.
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A practitioner of the banned Falun Gong sect was sentenced to 4 years in prison last year for posting an essay on the Web that extolled the sect’s virtues.
The restrictions may well succeed in suppressing the free flow of information in cyberspace in the same way that the existing state security laws serve to deter the expression of political opinions in the real world: by creating uncertainty.
The laws cast a wide net, rendering not only those who actually post sensitive information liable for prosecution but also the sites that host them.
Portals that want to keep their business licenses can be expected to intensify their in-house monitoring. Participants in chat rooms will be required to report to the authorities any sensitive comments that appear, a tactic that has worked for decades to deter the expression of private opinions.