As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching


Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Lu Xiaobo, center, and Hu Yingying, right, undergraduates at Shanghai Normal University, monitor university Internet forums for signs of dissent.

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: May 9, 2006

SHANGHAI, May 8 — To her fellow students, Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate, plain of dress, quick with a smile and perhaps possessed with a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary.

And for Ms. Hu, a sophomore at Shanghai Normal University, coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads. For several hours each week she repairs to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers, where she logs in unsuspected by other students to help police her school's Internet forums.

Once online, following suggestions from professors or older students, she introduces politically correct or innocuous themes for discussion. Recently, she says, she started a discussion of what celebrities make the best role models, a topic suggested by a professor as appropriate.

Politics, even school politics, is banned on university bulletin boards like these. Ms. Hu says she and her fellow moderators try to steer what they consider negative conversations in a positive direction with well-placed comments of their own. Anything they deem offensive, she says, they report to the school's Web master for deletion.

During some heated anti-Japanese demonstrations last year, for example, moderators intervened to cool nationalist passions, encouraging students to mute criticisms of Japan.

Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator — and all without the knowledge of her fellow students — Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech.

But Ms. Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.

In April that effort was named "Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow," and it is part of a broader "socialist morality" campaign, known as the Eight Honors and Disgraces, begun by the country's leadership to reinforce social and political control.

Under the Civilized Internet program, service providers and other companies have been asked to purge their servers of offensive content, which ranges from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent.

Chinese authorities say that more than two million supposedly "unhealthy" images have already been deleted under this campaign, and more than 600 supposedly "unhealthy" Internet forums shut down.

Critics of the program say the deletions, presented as voluntary acts of corporate civic virtue, are clearly coercive, since no company wants to be singled out as a laggard.

Having started its own ambitious Internet censorship efforts — a "harmful-information defense system," as the university calls it — long before the government's latest campaign, Shanghai Normal University is promoting itself within the education establishment as a pioneer.

Although most of its students know nothing of the university's monitoring efforts, Shanghai Normal has conducted seminars for dozens of Chinese universities and education officials on how to tame the Web.

Nevertheless, school officials were not eager to talk about the program. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it there's not much to say about it" said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the school's propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized."

For her part, Ms. Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building a "harmonious society."

"We don't control things, but we really don't want bad or wrong things to appear on the Web sites," she said. "According to our social and educational systems, we should judge what is right and wrong. And as I'm a student cadre, I need to play a pioneer role among other students, to express my opinion, to make stronger my belief in Communism."

While the national Web censorship campaign all but requires companies to demonstrate their vigilance against what the government deems harmful information, the new censorship drive on college campuses shows greater subtlety and, some would say, greater deviousness.

It is here that the government is facing perhaps its most serious challenge: how to direct and control young people's thoughts in a world of increasingly free and diverse information. And the answer relies heavily on stealth.

For one thing, interviews with many students at the school's sprawling and well-manicured campus showed that few knew anything about the student-run monitoring. Even those who had heard of it never imagined that so many students were involved.

"Five hundred members sounds unbelievable," said a male undergraduate who, fearing official reprisals, asked that he be identified only as Zhu. "It feels very weird to think there are 500 people out there anonymously trying to guide you."

As they try to steer discussion on bulletin boards, the monitors pose as ordinary undergraduates, in a bid for greater persuasive power.

Even topics that to outsiders would seem devoid of political interest merit intervention. One recent discussion about the reported sale online of a video showing the torture of a cat grew heated. Some urged harsh punishment or even death to the animal abusers, while others said the video should be sold to the Japanese, because of their supposed fondness for perverse material.

At that, several monitors jumped in and began talking about the need to develop China's legal code to handle such matters.

The monitors do not see themselves as engaging in censorship or exercising control over the speech of others. In interviews with five of the monitors, each initially rejected the idea that they were controlling expression, and occasionally even spoke of the importance of free speech.

"Our job consists of guidance, not control," said Ji Chenchen, 22, who is majoring in travel industry studies. "Our bulletin board's character is that of an official Web site, which means that it represents the school. This means that no topics related to politics may appear."

A classmate, Tang Guochao, agreed. "A bulletin board is like a family, and in a family, I want my room to be clean and well-lighted, without dirty or dangerous things in it."

In the past, China's efforts to control the Internet have often foundered in the face of the curiosity and inventiveness of Web surfers, who constantly find ingenious ways to find content that is banned and to discuss controversial topics.

Several students at Shanghai Normal University said they expected the same thing to happen there.

"I don't think anybody can possibly control any information in the Internet," said Ji Xiaoyin, 20, a junior studying mechanical design. "If you're not allowed to talk here you just go to another place to talk, and there are countless places for your opinions. It's easy to bypass the firewalls, and anybody who spends a little time researching it can figure it out."