Q. & A. with Rebecca MacKinnon: Internet in China

The Chinese Communist Party can move like a gazelle when it senses that its grip on social stability might be at stake. Within days of Mubarak’s downfall, Beijing had rounded up liberal activists, slowed the Web to a crawl, and poured security forces into areas that it thought could be used for the kind of online organizing that is sweeping the Middle East. Smack in the middle of that, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on “Internet freedom” last week, and she singled out China and other authoritarian countries for facing a “dictator’s dilemma” in their attempts to control the Internet. For analysis, I turned to Rebecca MacKinnon, who knows as much as anyone about the Internet in China. She is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices Online, an international citizen media project. (Her book “Consent of the Networked” will be published next year by Basic Books.)

Will the “portfolio of technologies, tools, and training” that Clinton promised have a meaningful effect for the Internet freedom of the average user in China? Or is this symbolic?

There has been a huge (one might even call it nasty) political fight going on in Washington over the past year over how to spend the thirty million dollars in congressional funds earmarked for “Internet freedom,” twenty-five million dollars of which has yet to be spent. I have no idea whether—or to what extent—the Chinese government is aware of these politics.

One camp in this fight believes that the funds should be spent almost exclusively on “circumvention tools”—software and services that help Internet users access Web sites that have been blocked. This camp believes that if enough “holes” can be “punched” in the Great Firewall of China and of other countries, like Iran, then political change will be greatly accelerated. (I like to call this the “party like it’s 1989” or the “Iron Curtain falling down 2.0” scenario.) They view the State Department’s failure to concentrate the earmarked funds exclusively on circumvention as evidence of its lack of spine and conflicted priorities, given that the U.S. has great diplomatic and economic interdependencies with China in particular. Within that camp, lobbyists and supporters of a Falun Gong-affiliated organization called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (G.I.F.C.), which makes free circumvention tools like Freegate, Dynaweb, and Ultrasurf, have been particularly vocal and effective in pressing their case. Aggressive media lobbying by friends of the G.I.F.C., and one lobbyist in particular named Michael Horowitz, of the Hudson Institute, has produced a series of articles in major media, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Wired, praising G.I.F.C.’s tools and supporting the idea that their tools should receive the bulk of the earmarked funding.

Lobbying by members of this camp has also convinced Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee*, to issue a report advocating that the remaining earmarked funds should be yanked from the State Department’s oversight and handed over to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Al Hurra Television, RFE/RFL, et cetera, because the B.B.G. has said it would spend the money exclusively on circumvention.

Another camp believes that obstacles to free speech on the Internet go far beyond Internet filtering or blocking of Web sites—which is the only problem that circumvention tools solve. These obstacles include aggressive cyber-attacks that bring down Web sites of activists, N.G.O.s and small media organizations; spyware that causes Internet users’ computers to be compromised so that their activities can be easily monitored; hacking of influential Internet users’ social-media accounts; deletion of sensitive content, deactivation of accounts and tracking of user behavior by Internet companies at government behest; and so forth. Circumvention tools do nothing to defend against any of these things. To be clear, I myself am very firmly in this second camp. I wrote in defense of this view for The Wall Street Journal last November, and testified in the House (pdf) and for the Congressional Executive Committee on China (pdf) in March. After many months of examining the situation and being lobbied aggressively by the first camp, the State Department decided that it agrees with the second camp. Its Request for Statements of Interest, posted in early January, reflects this view, as did Clinton’s remarks on Tuesday.

Now, this twenty-five-million-dollar portfolio is not aimed just at China but at a whole range of countries where political and religious speech is censored online, where surveillance of people trying to conduct political and religious conversations on the Internet or through mobile phones is extensive, and where people who try to use digital technologies to organize peaceful political and religious activities can find themselves under attack. That’s not a lot of money, and given how dangerous it is for people in China to receive overseas money of any kind—let alone from the U.S. government—I would say that we’re unlikely to see direct funding of any China-based groups. Some of the money will still go to circumvention tools, and, while I have no insight into who has submitted funding proposals let alone who will get the money, I would say it’s pretty likely that G.I.F.C. groups may get some of it, while other circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon will likely get funding, along with projects to aid their translation and dissemination. Other projects to develop tools and training that help people evade online surveillance and defend against cyber-attacks will certainly be of help and use to people in China—including journalists both foreign and domestic. I know some groups working on software and hardware related to mobile-phone security, which is a huge issue in China. So, if they get funded, it’s easy to imagine how some people in China could benefit. In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt—something that also happened in Xinjiang—I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.

Given the tiny amount of money being spent, however, one can really only consider it to be seed money that might help encourage software developers and technologists who care about free speech around the world to focus their work in certain ways, or to collaborate with some of the grantees. It may help some of the grantees get more private funding or volunteer support. At the end of the day, though, given that the average Internet user in China isn’t very political and often isn’t even aware of how much censorship takes place, the people who would potentially benefit from these technologies will be certain specific types: the edgier Chinese investigative journalists, rights-defending lawyers, grievance petitioners, and other people who are inclined to get active around certain causes.

Clinton said there is “only one Internet,” but Chinese authorities disagree. Knowing Chinese Web entrepreneurs as you do, do they generally see themselves as doing the best they can within a restricted system, or does the official view have support among Chinese private-sector technologists?

I think most see themselves as doing the best they can—although I’ve also spoken to executives at Chinese Internet and mobile companies who have told me that they agree with their government that the Chinese people aren’t ready for democracy, and if censorship was lifted all of a sudden the country would go haywire. I get the impression that at least some of them genuinely believe this. What’s more, if you’re the C.E.O. of a huge Chinese Internet company you’re benefitting from your relationship with an existing set of government officials, which you’ve spent large amounts of time and resources cultivating. If things were to change it might be harder for you to compete on your company’s technical merits and not be able to rely as heavily on your “guanxi”—especially in light of today’s environment, where the international players are largely excluded thanks to censorship and other political factors that have kept YouTube, Facebook, and other global services away from the average Chinese Internet user.

I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market—which is a big enough challenge even for the established players—that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture. A few of the “elders” do, like Edward Tian, the founder of China Netcom, who last year lamented that shielding Chinese companies from competition with the big global players is bad for Chinese innovation and Chinese industry in the long run.

It’s also not clear to me—since I now live in the U.S. and no longer spend as much time in China as I used to—whether Chinese entrepreneurs have thought or care much about how the censorship and surveillance requirements that they are subject to might handicap them with customers outside of China, if and when they start thinking about international expansion. For most companies this isn’t an issue because the Chinese market is so huge, with more than half of China’s population yet to go online. But it is already starting to be a question for companies like Baidu. Why should I as a non-Chinese Internet user trust Baidu any more than I trust the Xinhua News Agency or the China Daily?

I think it’s also important to point out that despite the Chinese government’s characterizations of U.S. policy, “one Internet” does not actually mean “a single Internet run by the United States.” Clinton reiterated the U.S. commitment to “multi-stakeholder Internet governance,” which means that the Internet should be governed through a process involving all governments as well as other stakeholders including companies, civil-society groups, and concerned Internet users from all over the world. China, of course, is in the camp that believes Internet governance should be for governments only. But the U.S. never said China should be excluded from Internet-governance processes. In fact, the Chinese government and Chinese companies are very active at ICANN, the organization that coördinates domain names and I.P. addresses, and Chinese engineers are heavily involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force, which coördinates the Internet’s technical standards (and which met in Beijing last November). So the Chinese are by no means excluded from global Internet governance—they’ve been welcomed. The problem is that the Chinese government doesn’t want to be discussing Internet regulatory or technical issues in the same room with pesky N.G.O.s and independent Internet user groups, which tend to be distrustful of all governments.

Clinton said that by year’s end the U.S. will have an “international strategy for cyberspace.” In your view, what needs to be in there to stand the best chance of promoting Internet freedom in China?

As I’ve said elsewhere, Internet freedom starts at home. The United States and all other democracies are struggling right now with the question of how to balance legitimate governance challenges like national defense, fighting terror, fighting crime, protecting children, and protecting intellectual property with the need to preserve civil liberties and human rights in digital spaces—to the same extent that we defend and preserve them in our physical spaces. One component of this strategy needs to be to figure out how democracies can lead the way in terms of best practices: What is the model and the road map for balancing security and liberty in the digital realm? If the world’s existing democracies don’t get it right, we can’t hold out much hope for anybody else. The U.S. and other democratic nations need to lead the way in establishing global regulatory and technical norms that can ensure that peaceful dissent will remain possible in online and mobile spaces, while criminals and terrorists can also be pursued in those spaces. In a world where governments increasingly have to share power and negotiate with other non-state actors in order to get anything done in a way that is effective and legitimate, this process must inevitably involve other “stakeholders”—businesses, N.G.O.s, and citizens’ groups.

I would love to see those leading this process reach out to Chinese Internet users and Chinese businesses—as well as the Chinese government—to participate in this conversation. There are a lot of serious debates taking place in China right now about how companies should handle user privacy, how Internet users should be protected from unwanted software downloads or spyware, how to protect children from predators and porn, how social networks should be regulated and whether people should be required to use their real names and national-I.D. numbers when setting up accounts, and so forth. People in China have a range of strong views about how children should be protected when they go online and whether the responsibility should be with the government, with parents, or somebody else. I don’t think most people in China realize the extent to which their debates have a lot in common with many debates being held in the West. If they knew how much activism and debate takes place in the democratic world around these issues—and that freedoms are never handed to us on a platter by any government; we have to fight for each and every one of them constantly—that would be very meaningful.

Ultimately, “Internet freedom” will not really happen in China unless Chinese people can envision what that means for themselves personally and then work to make it happen. The first step in that direction is having a vision of what might actually be possible, beyond the only kind of Internet most Chinese people have ever known. The second step is figuring out, practically, how to get from what they have to what they want. Once again, Americans can’t tell them how to do that, or hand them a customized “app” to make it happen. In the end, however, things are unlikely to change very much unless China’s Internet entrepreneurs and C.E.O.s decide that it’s in their long-term interest to help build a different future and help their users and customers get there.

*An earlier version of this post misidentified Lugar as the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.