The "Shawshank Redemption" has nothing to do with China, but that hasn't kept social media censors from blocking the movie's title from searches on the country's most popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo.
After last month's dramatic escape by the the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng from house arrest in Shandong Province into U.S. diplomatic custody, Weibo's internal censors moved quickly to ban searches for Chen's name and related terms like "embassy." People determined to discuss Chen's case were forced to speak in code -- and the Shawshank Redemption, a Hollywood movie about a dramatic prison break -- quickly caught on. So did the censors. According to the California-based China Digital Times, a website that closely monitors Chinese Internet censorship, the movie title has been banned on Weibo since April 28 -- along with the names of Linyi township and Dong Shigu village where Chen is from, as well as the Chinese word for "pearl," which happens to be the English name of He Peirong, the woman who helped him escape and who is now believed in custody.
Due to censorship, if one were to poll a random sample of college-educated people in China today, very few would know about Chen. Concern for his case is limited mainly to liberal-minded bloggers, social media mavens, and intellectuals who make a point of seeking out and passing around alternative news. Nobody knows exactly how large this group is, but Xiao Qiang, founder of the China Digital Times, estimates that it may amount to roughly 2-3 million people.
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in China for high-level diplomatic talks already overshadowed by Chen's case, this small but elite group was following news of her visit. To get the full story, however, they had to circumvent the nationwide Internet censorship system known popularly as the "Great Firewall of China" that keeps Chinese social media and other domestic web services within a censored walled garden. Some use circumvention software funded by Clinton's own State Department. But as Washington has been learning the hard way, bringing free and open Internet to a critical mass of Chinese people is neither cheap nor easy.
Since 2008, the State Department has spent more than $70 million on "Internet freedom programming" worldwide. In budget year 2012 it will spend $25 million and is requesting $27.5 million for 2013 -- one of the few government expenditures, it seems, that garners bipartisan support these days. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which runs the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and other services aimed at audiences in countries without a free press, was given $10 million by Congress to spend in the current fiscal year and is requesting an increase for next year.
After Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010 that Internet freedom would be a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, the State Department decided to take what Clinton calls a "venture capital" approach to the funding of tools, research, public information projects, and training. Censorship, as it turns out, is only one of many threats faced by people seeking to speak, assemble, and access information online. Other threats include surveillance, spyware, hacking of activist websites and social media accounts, and total Internet shutdown -- something that most famously happened last year in Egypt but has happened elsewhere. The Chinese government sometimes shuts down the Internet and mobile services in specific areas where unrest occurs. Faced with a global mandate and a multitude of threats to online freedom, the State Department says it funds the development and deployment of more than 20 different circumvention and secure communications technologies, in addition to in-person training for thousands of activists in different parts of the world, as well as online campaigns to raise public awareness about censorship and surveillance.
This approach came under attack in 2010 from administration critics who argued that the State Department should instead focus the bulk of its funding on circumvention tools called Freegate and Ultrasurf, created by members of the Falun Gong religious sect, a group that is banned in China and whose members are well documented to have been victims of widespread human rights abuses at the hands of Chinese authorities. Created roughly a decade ago by volunteer programmers working out of the homes of Chinese exiles in the United States, they are among the earliest widely adopted non-commercial tools developed specifically to subvert the censorship of an authoritarian regime. Demand for such tools by Internet users in China has spiked over the past several months in the wake of the political leadership crisis triggered by the public downfall of Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai. According to the Ultrasurf team, traffic from China on the project's servers jumped from 70,000 users per day last December to around 200,000 in April -- spiking to a high of 270,000 on April 11, right after the arrest of Bo Xilai's wife in connection with the suspected murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.
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