Well-managed propaganda through a controlled media system is the increasingly important means by which China achieves mind control, protects "social stability," and satisfies dictators' political, economic, and personal interests.

New telecommunication technologies bring new opportunities and challenges to both the Chinese government and people in China who seek basic human rights. The SARS episode demonstrated some of these recently introduced dynamics.

ISPs collaborate well with China in terms of media control through self-censorship and technical control of their subscribers.

1) A few newspapers or magazines received warning or were closed for crossing the line. But there is no report of an Internet news provider experiencing this kind of problem. The "volunteer" petition for "self-censorship" signed by leading ISPs in China solidifies China’s capability to ensure self-censorship within the private sector.

A lawyer from a US based company stated, "We"we have to comply with Chinese law." Compared to journalists running traditional media, capitalists running commercial portals follow Chinese law more closely.

Compared to traditional media, the Internet is advertised as "a more personal selection of the content," "providing more immediacy to stimulate audience interest," and "providing global reach."

With its content following traditional media closely, the Internet is becoming a more efficient channel for the Chinese government to outsource mind control to private/foreign investors.

2) The most important feature of the Internet is the flexibility it provides for individuals who use it. Users can choose to use SMS, email, or chat functions, or to visit personal or foreign-based websites or visiting overseas websites. Although very rare in terms of frequency, ISPs collaborate with the government to arrest online activists, which in turn imposes self-censorship on individual users.

Filtering is the most common method used by ISPs to control individual use. Many Western companies are reported to have been involved in building the filtering system. Late last year, China’s filtering capability increased dramatically. We have identified the source of this increase as world-class technologies employed at the national level, either built in or plugged into backbone routers.

Throughout the SARS episode, Internet news providers never significantly deviated from the news provided in traditional media. Shortly after April 20, when SARS suddenly become a hot topic, "feidianxing feiyan" (the Chinese name used for SARS) became a filtered phrase in both email and SMS.

In summary, ISPs in China - including foreign ISPs who enter the Chinese market - are determined to collaborate with the government in terms of information control. The social and technical mechanisms to perform these controls have now become well established.

Individual use of information technology remains difficult to control with technological methods due to the quantity, variations, and dispersion of individual use. Self-censorship and indifference are the two major mechanisms used to control information flow. Technical blocking functions basically as an enhancement of self-censorship.

In China, "political" is portrayed as a very negative word when it comes to personal involvement, while it is well justified for politicians. These "political information" ranges from dissident essays, history studies, and Falun Gong to AIDS. "Anti-China," "conspiracy with the U.S.," "disrupting social order" are other terms used to increase Chinese’s resistance to these information. These propagandas are amazingly effective, and provide Chinese immunity to objective information even when they receive it. Moreover, most people will be more interested in local news rather than AIDS victims in a village in Henan province.

SARS has been the incentive for some people to seek uncensored information.

SARS has made the Chinese government lose face in the international community, and incurred strong criticisms from countries all over the world. Inside China, fear of SARS has caused merchandise to go out of stock and even caused riots. It looks "anti-China," "conspiracy" and "political."

DynaWeb is a technology that Chinese can use to access any websites without being filtered or monitored. On April 20, shortly after China acknowledged their hiding of SARS information, traffic on DynaWeb increased by 50% within one day.

Unlike other "political issue", SARS is a matter of life or death. Also, SARS is a scientific problem. Despite China’s belated effort to battle SARS by providing limited public information, some Chinese lost trust in government controlled media and are seeking technologies to access uncensored information.

Seeking information of SARS, more Chinese are using various technologies to retrieve uncensored information. Data shows that their interests in uncensored news remains after they are exposed to independent news source.

Analysis of DynaWeb logs shows that more than 70% of the visits are for Chinese language news sites. Among the top 20 most visited news, most of them are commentary and news of Jiang, Hu or other Chinese leaders. Around June 4^th, many popular articles reviewing the history around June 4, 1989 entered the top 20 as well.

The lack of relevance to SARS of those popular news items implies that SARS-motivated visitors are now interested in other "political news." In this area of "political news," overseas websites will be far more attractive than news provided in China. Therefore, this increased traffic should be sustained. In fact, DynaWeb traffic keeps rising and reached record highs on June 2 after China announced a zero increase of SARS patients.

The dramatic enhancement of Internet filtering technologies may be attributed to the advance of circumventing technologies last year.

Funded by IBB, Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) maintains a reasonable success in sending out daily VOA and RFA newsletters to a growing list of emails in China. Launched last March, DynaWeb has stayed ahead of China’s filtering technologies for more than one year. Late last year, Ultrareach launched its solution aimed at a fundamentally unblockable technology.

Far more is technically possible, but was not accomplished due to lack of resources.

As mentioned above, indifference is one major barrier to the large scale flow of uncensored information. Various efforts have been taken by content providers to provide attractive contents.

• Overall content

www.secretchina.com is the most successful news editor. Although it does not provide first hand news, it remains the most popular website according to DynaWeb logs.

• Response to SARS

RFA set up a separate domain devoted to SARS related information. VOA included a table of daily statistics in its email newsletter. Various websites set up special columns devoted to SARS related news.

• Information flowing out of China

www.epochtimes.com published many first hand reports of SARS in China. Information technologies make this possible without the permission and cost of sending reporters to China. Some of the information was collected through phone calls and secret reporters in China. This kind of effort may eventually lead to competitive news local to Chinese cities and allow foreign based content providers to really penetrate the main part of the Internet news market in China.

• Information flow within China

www.minghui.org provides preformatted flyers with customized contents for distribution in China. Devoted volunteers in China actively are distributing them.

A full discussion of possible mechanisms information technologies provide will be very interesting but beyond the scope of this presentation.

As stated repeatedly by China, "stability is the highest priority" of the Chinese government. Most social problems will eventually lead to criticism of government officials and the political system itself. China will never give up media control since it will hurt the stability of the totalitarian regime.