25 Mar 2014 | Asia and Pacific, China, News and features
Lhasa, Tibet (Image: Prasad Kholkute/Creative Commons)
“What kind of device is that sniper on the rooftop using?”
“People’s Armed Police are everywhere.”
“Emerging from military compounds are Special Police, all driving mighty armoured vehicles.”
These are the messages sent by ordinary Chinese tourist about their trips to Tibet, collected by the International Campaign for Tibet, and published on their website.
While Tibetans themselves face fierce internet restrictions and harsh penalties if they try to spread information about the military occupation, Chinese tourists appear to be inadvertently breaching “the great Firewall of China” by sharing holiday snaps with friends back home. The messages and photos, which have been leaking out fairly infrequently since 2009, represent a rare source of information for those interested in repression in Tibet.
The tourists post photos of the considerable military presence — despite occasional warnings. Most comment on the large numbers of troops deployed.
“You can see People’s Armed Police troops everywhere in Lhasa. A guard post every ten meters…”
“Every three steps there’s a heavily armed People’s Armed Police checkpoint, there are armoured vehicles and tanks which you wouldn’t dare to photograph.”
“The Jokhang [most sacred temple in Tibet] is surrounded by heavily armed, fire-extinguisher toting People’s Armed Police.”
One photo shows a column of a hundred or so Chinese soldiers marching down a street. Another shows armoured cars on the move, and another a cohort of tanks. A picture sneakily snapped behind some marching soldiers shows fire extinguishers strapped to their backpacks.
Also striking amongst the comments are what appear to be genuinely held fears by Han Chinese tourists about the Tibetan residents.
“The number of Tibetans going back and forth on the streets made us worry about our safety, but when we asked the officer on duty they said it was safe, no problem.”
“Tibetans have a very strange look in their eyes, especially at night. It’s best not to do anything on the street by yourself,” said one, who admitted to carrying a Swiss Army knife during his trip, for protection.
These images are precious. Research in 2012 showed that half of all Weibo posts originating from Tibet were being deleted, compared to just 12% in Beijing. Last year, authorities installed a new system for monitoring both internet and phone traffic — while Tibetans living in nearby Sichuan province have seen their internet connections shut down en masse.
Anne Henochowicz, Translations Editor for China Digital Times, remembers a recent crackdown: “For several weeks in early summer 2012, Tibet was sealed off from all foreign visitors,” she told Index. “It was following two self-immolations in Lhasa in May. Chinese tourists were still allowed entry, and posted photos of armed troops in the city streets, along with posts describing increased security measures.”
Translations of the messages were posted on China Digital Times, an independent news website with a focus on freedom of expression in China’s complex and highly restricted online space.
Dechen Pemba, UK resident but editor of the Tibetan website High Peaks Pure Earth, put the leaked images in perspective: “Tibetans are not free to comment, document or report on their own situations. You only have to look at what happened to Dhondup Wangchen in 2008,” she told Index.
Wangchen was sentenced on 28 December 2009 following a secret trial in Xining city, western China, receiving six years in prison for producing a documentary film interviewing 100 Tibetans. He is one of many Tibetan political prisoners in China.
“Tibetans are well aware of the risk of using Weibo and public platforms online,” says Pemba. “Despite controls, Tibetans are also finding other ways to speak out and express themselves such as through poetry and song.” Pemba’s blog has been key in highlighting this trend — offering translations of works by Tibetans.
During high-tension periods, Chinese forces are not afraid to take special measures. In 2011, Pemba points out, searching Chinese social media site Weibo for mentions of “self immolations” yielded zero results. This was strange, given seven self-immolations had occurred in the past three weeks.
“After the riots in 2012,” continues Pemba. “Internet connections and mobile phone signals were cut off for over 50 kilometres around the areas affected.”
The Save Tibet campaign continues to document all of these images, under the title “Has life here always been like this?”. It has been extremely difficult to find information about Tibet without either going there, or relying on opportunistic citizen journalism. Chinese tourists, snapping away and posting to Weibo, provide a surprising back-channel into the Tibetan struggle.
This article was published on 25 March 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
1 Jul 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China, Digital Freedom
Today, 1 July, is the Communist Party’s 90th birthday. In celebration, Chinese web censors have been working feverishly to tighten their control of the internet.
Those of us who try to sidestep the Great Firewall with a VPN, a service that allows users to bypass regional filters by taking the connection to a different location – best described as a “tunnel” that allows access to the unfettered web – have been noticing that many services are increasingly unreachable.
My VPN service went AWOL on 28 June.
VPN companies say that China is using a new tactic – DNS poisoning – a more insidious method that requires VPN customers to re-download and reinstall software if they want to continue their access.
From my VPN service provider (name withheld):
“For the upcoming 90-year anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) China has chosen a different approach: DNS-poisoning. This means that any VPN server or website that ends with “NAME OF VPN PROVIDER.COM” will be unreachable from China. The only way to solve this is by changing our domain name.”
Index on Censorship asked BestVPN, a VPN review website, to explain how DNS poisoning works and what lies in store for the cat and mouse game between Chinese web censors and VPN service providers. The webmaster who replied to these questions asked not to be named.
What is DNS poisoning?
Great Firewall (GFW) authorities have taken another rather ‘cheap’ measure to block the filtered sites i.e. DNS poisoning.
DNS is a system which translates your normal website addresses like youtube.com, facebook.com into numerical figures to send it to particular address in order to retrieve the information.
For example, as we cannot remember IP addresses like 12.32.12.43, therefore, we are normally given domain names like youtube.com to remember easily.
When we type a particular domain name in our address bar DNS translates it into an IP address and sends your request to a particular address to retrieve the information.
Now what the GFW authorities have done is that they have poisoned DNS, and the request you send by typing a particular URL (blocked URL) in your address bar, returns with fake or malicious content.
GFW authorities are doing this by ordering their ISPs [internet service providers] to take part in this and block/poison what is prohibited by them.
What do you recommend web users do in China if they find their VPN ‘broken‘?
Well, there is nothing much visitors can do in China if their VPN service domain has been poisoned.
The only choice in my knowledge is for the VPN service provider to change their domain name.
In the past, several VPN service providers’ domain names were blocked in China by blocking their server IP addresses.
The providers changed their IP addresses and China again blocked it, and it went on until the GFW of China came up with DNS poisoning.
It is obviously not that easy [to change a domain name] as it has taken them years to build a website and a brand around one domain name.
If a VPN provider’s domain has been poisoned, you may face huge disruptions in services, until the domain name has been changed or de-poisoned.
Are there many more tools that China can use to cripple VPN?
Yes, China can do more and more, and up till now it has truly been a cat and mouse game.
We have seen China blocking VPN services and several other websites and we have seen VPN services breaking the GFW.
There are just as many ways to cripple VPN services in China, as there are to cripple the GFW.
There is nothing on the internet that cannot be decoded.
The one who suffers is the VPN user in China.
18 Feb 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
China’s Global Times Chinese edition is well known for being a nationalist paper owned by the Communist Party. The Chinese edition is often peppered with official jargon and an attitude to Western countries that can be summarized as a pugnacious China criticizing a west that wants to see China fail.
It is therefore a surprise that today the English edition of the Global Times published an article on the architect of China’s Internet censorship system, colloquially known as the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall, or the GFW, is the filtering device that censors keywords and causes websites to be blocked. The man named Fang Binxing was in the news recently for signing up to China’s Twitter, Sina weibo, and then quickly shutting the account after netizens accused him of being an enemy of netizens.
Fang, a 50-year-old President of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications was born in the cold Northeast, where he also earned degrees and teaching post at the prestigious Harbin Institute of Technology. Then at the age of 39 he turned to work for the “National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team” (according to the Global Times article). Various accolades from government bodies and a post at the National University of Defense Technology put Fang into the political mainstream. In this rare and astounding interview he says that he developed the GFW technology as a defense tool, something that can protect China from harm caused by foreign forces. To illustrate this point, in the interview he gave he said:
“Some countries hope North Korea will open up its Internet,” he says. “But if it really did so, other countries would get the upper hand.”
Because of the high traffic that the article has generated, the journalist who interviewed Fang Binxing, Fang Yunyu (unrelated) told me tonight in Beijing that she was afraid of the impact that it was having. By 6:30pm, both the Guardian and LA Times had reposted content from the article, with supplementary reporting on the “Father of the Great Firewall”. For a state paper, too much controversy wasn’t good, especially when it reflected negatively on the country.
Today, when I asked Zola, a prominent citizen journalist and internet specialist, whether he thought of Fang Binxing as an enemy, and why he thought Fang would give an interview to the Global Times, he told me:
I think Fang Binxing is an enemy of the netizen: he blocks websites, helps the government control information, disrupts emails, and increases the capital for netizens to go online [because they have to purchase proxies and VPNs]. Also, the people did not give him this power. If I had the right to vote, I would vote against Fang Binxing.
He agreed to the interview by the Global Times English edition because it’s a domestic paper, so perhaps he thought it would be safe. But we think that the English edition actually has less limitations in terms of news and speech, and compared to the Chinese edition it is more to the point.
Indeed, this time, Global Times English edition hit the nail on the head, and despite journalist Fang Yunyu’s worries, the article has its interview subject has hit the mainstream. On Chinese platform Yeeyan, a translation of the article has already appeared. One user calling himself Shen Yichen, leaves a comment: “This post will be on fire soon, so leave a comment to make a mark.”
23 Dec 2010 | Asia and Pacific, China
One of the main men behind China’s Great Firewall recently got a taste of his own medicine.
Fang Binxing, credited with building a system which is used to block websites in China, shut down his microblog earlier this week after Chinese netizens, angry at censorship, bombarded his newly-opened microblogging account with angry comments.
Fang, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, reportedly asked Sina, the owner of the very popular twitter-like service weibo, to delete his blog, after several hours of apparently trying to delete the flood of comments as they poured in.
China Digital Times has reproduced some of the more colourful comments left on Fang’s weibo including: “f–-k you 404 times” [ a reference to the ‘404 error’ message which occasionally appears when pages are blocked]; a suggestion that if Fang is unhappy with the comments he could simply block weibo itself now; and “a Twitter user is here to laugh at Eunuch Fang’s Great Firewall.”
The Wall Street Journal said people were alerted to Fang’s weibo account when the 50-year-old professor sent a message to a famous TV anchor Jing Yidan: “Hi, I’m on Weibo now, although I don’t dare be as outspoken as you all, haha.”
Global Times, a local English-language paper, carried the story, but was careful to balance it with comments that cited unnamed sources as saying the censorship was necessary to protect national security.
