Uncontrollable access to digital media is leading changes in Chinese media

2,000 Chinese newspapers have had government subsidy removed

Previously, state-run media have inhabited a protected environment of subsidies and compulsory subscriptions, but with the exception of a handful of publications this carpet has been pulled from under the feet of the industry in the last few months. Chinese media now have to weather the vagaries of the market on their own. More than 600 newspapers are already known to have stopped publishing, but other new and competitive publications are emerging to seize the public's thirst for well-written news and features, excellent photography and daring stories.

City streets still have daily state-run newspapers on display for public information, and these are much used by the public. But newspaper stands are doing brisk business and have a wide variety of publications designed for an increasingly discerning public. The public's greater access to international media, digitally, is raising public expectations in terms of quality of design, images and investigative and analytical writing from its own press. In this way, access to internet has lead many changes in the media.

The number of internet users in China are already in excess of 100 million and growing fast. This means that the job of censoring what people have access to is becoming increasingly difficult. There are also over 300 million Chinese people with mobile phones, and with 3G also taking root, and this is giving mobile access to the internet which is even more difficult to control than fixed landline access.

Though home-based access to internet is still limited because people cannot afford a computer, internet cafes, many of them vast by Western standards housing hundreds of computers, are becoming increasingly common across the country. Many people can easily afford to spend hours on the internet, browsing, chatting, playing games, or publishing websites. The scene is a familiar one in other countries too, but in China there is the added element of censorship. But it is quite easy, and common, to get around it.

The Chinese government tries to block sites that are pornographic, something many of us might be grateful for in the West, but we know what success Western authorities have in blocking content of interest to paedophiles for example.

Movement of information - moving stacks of books on a bicycle

The government tries to block content it considers to be culturally damaging and politically subversive, it is easy to see what a difficult job this is. The government has resisted the full-scale profit-driven invasion of Western-style consumerism, in attempts to protect national identity and culture, which many would consider admirable. But the control over political ideas is less well thought of. But it is difficult to implement.

For example if an area of the BBC website is blocked on a particular day, as it was when I tried, I can still find the content I'm interested in from other news websites, large and small all over the world. The government can't block everything, internet users know it, and the government knows it.

It is easy to hide your online activity and there are abundant online resources to help people do that. For example, a remailer allows people to send e-mail anonymously and makes it impossible for anyone to trace and identify the sender. The HushMail Remailer is an example of this.

There are also services that allow people to surf the web anonymously, such as Anonymizer which is paid by the US government to promote its service in China and already has millions of users. Anonymizer uses "military grade" encryption technology so that noone can see what you've been looking at on the web.

New media: one of hundreds of internet cafés in Beijing. The emergence of digital media is having an impact on media policy.

And there is also anonymous uploading to the net. The Free Network Project, for example, which has a Chinese version, aims to give benefits of free speech to people in China and other countries, by allowing them to post anonymously to websites. These benefits, the organisers believe, far outweigh the risks of untraceable online activity by paedophiles or terrorists, though this is contested by critics.

In a country of 1.3 billion people, with no restrictions to connect to the internet itself, the government knows that it is losing the battle to control the accessing, and sharing, of information they'd prefer to restrict. Greater access to information, along with the strengthening of civil society by people finding their voice in new media and bringing together the like-minded into interest groups – these are powerful democratic forces within China that will likely bring increasing accountability of the government, but won't be without costs.

Links:
http://www.hushmail.com
http://www.anonymizer.com
http://freenet.sourceforge.net