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By David Barboza | The New York Times
13 August 2010

In an apparent bid to extend its control over the Internet and cash in on the rapid growth of mobile devices, China plans to create a government-controlled search engine.

The new venture would compete with Baidu.com, a private company that runs China's dominant search engine. Baidu's market has grown since Google retreated from the mainland earlier this year.

The state-owned China Mobile -- the world's biggest cellphone carrier -- and Xinhua, China's official state-run news agency, signed an agreement on Thursday to create a joint venture called the Search Engine New Media International Communications Company.

China already has the world's largest number of Internet users, more than 420 million, and also the largest number of mobile phone subscribers, with more than 800 million.

Private start-up companies play a big role on the Web in China, but the government maintains tight control over Internet companies and censors content that it deems dangerous or sensitive.

Now, though, analysts say that Beijing is pushing state-run companies to take a more active role online. China Central Television, the nation's dominant broadcaster, is trying to develop an online video site. Xinhua News Agency is trying to build a global platform of news providers using television and the Internet.

At the announcement of the joint venture in Beijing on Thursday, Zhou Xisheng, vice president of Xinhua, said the new company would build a leading search engine platform. But he also said the move was "part of the country's broader efforts to safeguard its information security and push forward the robust, healthy and orderly development of China's new media industry."

Representatives of Baidu could not be reached for comment.

For years, Baidu has dominated Internet searches in China, holding a sizable lead over Google, which entered the market late. Earlier this year, Google pulled its search engine out of Beijing after complaining about censorship and online attacks that appeared to be coming from hackers within China.

Google now operates its Chinese-language search engine from Hong Kong; it is accessible from China but some results are censored by the government.

Most of China's other big, private Internet companies are involved in online games and entertainment. But on Monday, Alibaba.com, one of the country's biggest e-commerce sites, said the company and a fund co-founded by its chairman would acquire a 16 percent stake in the search engine Sogou, which is owned by the Chinese portal Sohu.com.

Yahoo, the United States portal, holds a 40 percent stake in the Alibaba Group.

>> Original Report

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
July 30, 2010

Three men accused of "endangering state security" for their roles in maintaining popular Uighur-language Web sites have been sentenced to prison terms of 3 to 10 years, according to exile groups and court officials.

The sentences, the outcome of a one-day trial last week, are the latest indication that Beijing is intensifying its crackdown on any dissent that questions Chinese rule in Xinjiang, the far western region where ethnic rioting last summer killed nearly 200 people, many of them Han Chinese whose growing numbers have stoked resentment among Uighurs.

Each of the accused men maintained a different site, each of which was shut down in the days after the unrest began in Urumqi, the regional capital. The three Web sites featured news articles and lively exchanges in Uighur, a Turkic language that is spoken by nearly half Xinjiang's 22 million people, the majority of whom are Muslim.

Friends and family members of the three convicted Webmasters said they were prosecuted for failing to quickly delete content that openly discussed the difficulties of life in Xinjiang and, in one case, for allowing users to post messages last summer announcing the protests that turned violent. Although the government maintains armies of paid censors, those who run Internet forums are ultimately responsible for removing so-called politically sensitive content.

Dilimulati Paerhati, the brother of one of the convicted men, has said he and his brother were scrupulous about deleting antigovernment postings on their site, Diyarim. He said his brother, Dilshat Perhat, even called the police to tell them about messages announcing the rally in Urumqi and was praised for his vigilance.

"My brother didn't do anything, this guy was honest," Mr. Paerhati told a student newspaper in Britain, where he is studying. "We'd never, never do anything against Chinese policy and the Chinese government."

In addition to his brother, who received a five-year sentence, the other convicted men are Nijat Azat, who was given 10 years, and Nureli, who received 3 years. A court official who answered the phone at the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court confirmed the sentences but declined to discuss the cases or give his name.

Although more than 1,000 people were detained in the days and weeks following the violence in Xinjiang -- at least two dozen have been sentenced to death -- Uighur exiles said the authorities appeared to be tightening the noose also around those engaged in nonviolent activities.

Last Friday, the government handed down a 15-year sentence to a Uighur journalist who wrote for another Web site. The writer, Gheyret Niyaz, was also convicted on state security charges, although his most egregious crime appears to have been giving an interview to a Hong Kong publication. Those who know Mr. Niyaz said they were stunned by the sentence, given his moderate political views.

Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uighur Congress in Sweden, said his organization knew of at least 76 people who had been detained for activities related to the Internet. Nearly all of them, he said, have been held incommunicado.

He said the government's campaign against Web-based expression seemed to have a twofold purpose: preventing negative news from reaching the outside world and preventing Uighurs from sharing such news -- or government criticism -- with one another. It was only in May, after a 10-month blackout, that Internet service was restored to the region.

"People have become terrified of surfing the Web," he said. "They're afraid that they land on the wrong page or write the wrong thing and they'll be taken away."

Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur academic in Beijing whose own Web site has been blocked for more than a year, said the detentions had put a chill on communications and discourse among the country's Uighurs, some of whom have a limited ability to read and write in Chinese. "We don't have many outlets in the traditional media," he said. "For the Uighur people, this is how we express ourselves, but at the moment, we're being silenced."

>> Original Report

By Brad Stone and David Barboza | The New York Times
June 29, 2010

In an effort to appease Beijing as it seeks to renew its license to operate in mainland China, Google plans to stop automatically redirecting Chinese users to its Hong Kong site.

For the last three months, Google has found a clever way to overcome its ethical objections to self-censoring search results on its Web site for mainland China, google.cn. It has automatically redirected Chinese users to an uncensored search site, google.com.hk, maintained on the company's servers in Hong Kong.

There was only one problem with this solution: the Chinese government objected to it.

Late Monday in the United States, Google acknowledged those objections in a blog post written by David Drummond, its chief legal officer. Mr. Drummond wrote that the Chinese government was ready to reject Google's application for renewal of its Internet Content Provider license, which would effectively mean the company would have to shut down its Web site in the country entirely. The license renewal application is due on Wednesday.

Mr. Drummond wrote that in an effort to continue to serve Google's Chinese users while placating the government, the company is proposing a compromise. In the next few days, it will stop automatically redirecting users to its Hong Kong site.

Instead, Chinese users will see a page at google.cn, which offers a single link to the Hong Kong site, where they can conduct searches or use other Google services, like translation and music, that require no filtering.

The company said it had resubmitted its content provider license based on this approach and hopes the Chinese government will find it more palatable. If the government continues to object, Google would lose its ability to operate a Web site in China altogether.

Google appears to have made the compromise out of concern that Beijing is preparing to entirely shut down its google.cn, which could confuse users in China by failing to notify them that they can reach the Hong Kong site. Because users have grown accustomed to google.cn it could hurt Google's traffic in China, the world's largest Internet market.

"If the Chinese government isn't happy with them running uncensored search results out of the Hong Kong site -- I don't see why they'll be any happier just because it becomes one click away," Danny Sullivan, who runs the search-analysis Web site Search Engine Land, told Bloomberg News.

China's foreign ministry on Tuesday declined to comment.

"This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page," Mr. Drummond wrote.

"This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law," he continued. "We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via google.cn."

Under the current setup in mainland China, search results are still censored. People in the mainland can conduct a search and see the results but often they can't open the citation because those results are censored by the government.

Up until January, Google had censored search results on behalf of the government in Beijing. Google had come under intense criticism from civil rights advocates in the West, and Google in January announced it would no longer do the censoring.

"As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China," Mr. Drummond wrote. "It's why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China."

Baidu, China's leading search engine, will start hiring software engineers directly from the United States early next month, as it seeks to expand its technological capabilities and raise its global profile, Reuters reported from Shanghai on Tuesday. Baidu stands to be the biggest beneficiary in China's search sector following Google's problems in the country.

Baidu plans to hire 30 mid- to senior-level software engineers from Silicon Valley at a job fair on July 10 to drive new technology projects, its first direct hiring from the United States, a Baidu spokesman said.

"Baidu believes that talent is the key to our success as a company, and we go where ever the best talent can be found, whether here in China or in Silicon Valley," Zheng Bin, Baidu's human resources director said in a statement to Reuters. "As we develop more and more advanced search technologies, our need for world-class talent will only continue to increase."

>> Original Report

By Robert Saiget - AFP - via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
June 08, 2010

China on Tuesday defended its right to censor the Internet, saying it needed to do so to ensure state security, and cautioned other nations to respect how it polices the world's largest online population.

The government's white paper on the Internet in China -- where more than 400 million people are now online -- comes after a very public row with Google over web freedoms which prompted the US firm to shut down its Chinese search engine.

The Google spat over censorship and cyberattacks touched off a war of words with the United States over Internet freedom, at a time when ties were already suffering over US arms sales to Taiwan and a host of trade and currency issues.

China "advocates the exertion of technical means" in line with existing laws and international norms "to prevent and curb the harmful effects of illegal information on state security, the public interest and minors", it said.

Such laws and regulations allow the curbing of content on everything from "instigating racial hatred or discrimination and jeopardising ethnic unity" to gambling, violence and obscenity, the government noted.

"Effectively protecting Internet security is an important part of China's Internet administration, and an indispensable requirement for protecting state security and the public interest," it said.

Beijing operates a vast system of web censorship, sometimes referred to as the "Great Firewall of China". It blocks access to any content the government deems unacceptable, ranging from pornography to political dissent.

Critics at home and abroad complain that the Internet rules stifle criticism of the ruling Communist Party and restrict discussion on sensitive topics such as Tibet and the brutal crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests.

But China on Tuesday insisted it "guarantees the citizen's freedom of speech on the Internet as well as the public's right to know, to participate, to be heard and to oversee" -- and warned foreign nations to keep quiet on the issue.

"Within Chinese territory, the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty. The Internet sovereignty of China should be respected and protected," the government said.

During a visit to China last month, European Commission vice president Neelie Kroes said that Beijing's web censorship constituted a trade barrier that should be looked at by the World Trade Organisation.

Kroes, who is in charge of charting the European Union's digital agenda, said China's "Great Firewall" was a trade issue "as long as that is a real barrier for communication".

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, China is among the worst nations in the world oppressing Internet bloggers, and had jailed 24 journalists as of December 2009, many of them Internet bloggers.

>> Complete Report

By John Pomfret | The Washington Post
May 12, 2010

The State Department has decided to fund a group run mainly by practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-like sect long considered Enemy No. 1 by the Chinese government, to provide software to skirt Internet censorship across the globe.

State Department officials recently called the group, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, offering it $1.5 million, according to Shiyu Zhou, one of the group's founders. A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the offer.

The decision, which came as the United States and China have recently moved to improve ties after months of tension, appears likely to irritate Beijing just as the two are set to resume a dialogue on human rights Wednesday for the first time in two years.

"GIFC is an organization run by elements of the Falun Gong cult, which is bent on vilifying the Chinese government with fabricated lies, undermining Chinese social stability and sabotaging China-U.S. relations," said Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. "We're strongly opposed to the U.S. government providing whatever assistance to such an anti-China organization."

The decision to fund GIFC followed a three-year lobbying campaign by Washington insiders, congressional pressure and opposition from some human rights advocates and Internet experts. It was also controversial within the Obama administration, sources said, despite the commitment of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Internet freedom.

Some officials worried that Beijing would view as a hostile act U.S. financial support for a group that China says has agitated for the overthrow of its government. Others were concerned the funds would get in the way of the Obama administration's broader engagement with China on issues as varied as climate change, the global financial crisis and efforts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea and Iran.

GIFC was started in 2001 mostly by Chinese-born scientists living in the United States in response to a withering crackdown in China on the Falun Gong sect. China launched the repression in 1999, and scores of practitioners are believed to have died at the hands of China's police and judicial authorities. China considered the Falun Gong movement, which on one day in April 1999 mobilized 20,000 practitioners to surround Communist Party headquarters in Beijing, as the most serious threat to its one-party rule since the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Members of the group were found throughout the upper ranks of the Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army.

The initial goal of GIFC was to allow practitioners of Falun Gong access to the teachings of Li Hongzhi, the sect's leader, who is believed to live in Queens, N.Y. But by last year Internet users in other countries where governments censor the Internet had begun using its software -- Freegate and Ultrasurf. Falun Gong also put ads encouraging people to join the sect on its software download page.

Freegate figured prominently in the demonstrations that rocked Tehran last year as Iranian dissidents used it to access Twitter and You Tube, which were blocked in Iran, to organize protests and post videos of the marches.

>> Complete Report