In less than 10 years, the Internet will go Chinese. That's the judgment of the World Intellectual Property Organization, at least. In July, the WIPO predicted that Chinese would become the most used language on the Web as early as 2007. And while these figures include businesses and Web surfers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, most of these new Internet users are expected to come from mainland China itself.
If it comes to pass, such a shift will mean big changes for everyone. The Internet is a product of the West, and largely of the United States. As such, it caters primarily to an English-speaking audience. It can cope with most European languages, but its core technologies, from the domain name system to HTML itself, don't translate naturally into as foreign a dialect as Mandarin.
But the biggest changes of all will be in store for China itself. If the People's Republic is to embrace the Western technology of the Internet, it must also contend with the decidedly Western values the Internet brings with it. For the Chinese people, the outcome of this clash could be positive or negative. Just which it will be largely depends on how we in the West choose to go about doing business with them.
Stumbling Blocks
China has long had a love-hate relationship with personal computing and the Internet. On the one hand, China sees the Web and e-commerce as tools for its own continued economic growth. On the other, the freedom of communication and the exchange of information the Internet brings are seen by many as formidable challenges to the totalitarian regime of the People's Republic.
The PRC has responded to these challenges by carefully controlling how Chinese citizens are able to access the Internet. By limiting the number of gateways through which network traffic can enter the country, the ruling Communist party has found it relatively easy to apply filters to that traffic, restricting access to those sites deemed unsuitable by the Ministry of State Security.
Western news sites including CNN, the BBC and Reuters are routinely blocked, as are those of dissident groups like the outlawed spiritual movement Falun Gong. The rare occasions when these blocks have been removed can usually be traced to political motives. For example, while several restrictions were lifted during a visit by President Bush for an Asia-Pacific economic conference in October, they were back in place mere hours after the president's flight departed the Beijing airport.
It may seem surprising that there hasn't been more public outcry within China in response to such measures. As outside observers, however, we must remember that the Confucian tradition that is the foundation of much of Asian thinking doesn't share the same value system as that of many Western societies. In Confucianism, the highest ideal is public duty, rather than individual freedom. As such, few Chinese citizens are likely to consider unrestricted access to the Internet a basic civil right.
Controlled Progress
Still, some dissidents have learned to use proxy servers that relay information from outside China's state-operated firewalls to view restricted sites. This practice has led to a cat-and-mouse game between regulators and dissidents, where censors continually scramble to screen out each new breach of security as it's discovered.
More recently, the Chinese government has embarked on a campaign of cracking down on the cybercafés that have proliferated in urban areas like Beijing and Shanghai. To date, over 17,000 of these Internet cafés have reportedly been raided and closed. The PRC's official justification has been that such places encourage access to evils like pornography and violent online games. Human rights activists strongly suspect, however, that dissident political content also rates high on the list of objectionable material.
This isn't to say that China is against the Internet. Unlike Middle Eastern governments, which tend to focus exclusively on the Web's allegedly poisonous influence on Islamic culture, the PRC also appreciates its value as a force for economic development. Or maybe it just sees the widespread penetration of Internet usage in China as inevitable — particularly in light of China's admission to the World Trade Organization this week.
Either way, rather than discouraging computing among its citizens, the Chinese government is doing just the opposite. It's encouraging computer literacy, and even Internet use, provided such use takes place in an appropriate state-sponsored setting.
For China, that setting is the public education system. According to Li Lianning, director of China's Department of Basic Education, by 2010 almost 90 percent of Chinese children will have access to broadband Internet connectivity before they reach high school. By 2005, every middle school will include Internet-technology education as part of its compulsory coursework for every student. As part of an experimental pilot program, some 50 million students have had access to such courses already.
The West Steps In
Western IT, telecom and computer companies are be all too happy to encourage this development in China, since it's almost certain to lead to increased business opportunities within the PRC. With a population of some 1.2 billion Chinese, the potential market for high-tech products and services is simply too large to ignore.
But North American and European companies throwing their hats into the ring of Chinese commerce and mandatory IT training won't necessarily translate to improvements for the Chinese people themselves. Some companies based in otherwise democratic nations are quite content to serve the demands of the market — in this case, the PRC government — irrespective of the implications for human rights in China.
Telecom giant Nortel, for example, which has long conducted business in China, recently inked a significant contract to overhaul the country's government-owned telecommunications infrastructure. Among the technology the Canadian company will provide to the PRC is the Nortel's "Personal Internet" suite of intelligent switching equipment, which can record the Web-surfing habits of individual subscribers. Civil rights activists fear that this equipment will aid the PRC government in conducting surveillance of Chinese Internet users.
For its part, Nortel denies any involvement in human rights violations in China, insisting in a statement issued earlier this year that it "sells the same range of products and solutions in China as [it does] everywhere." But, ultimately, are such assurances good enough?
The Road Not Taken
When the more high minded of our pundits discuss the Internet, they tend to speak of it as a democratizing force. The Web, message boards, e-mail, chat rooms and instant messaging all contribute to an environment that allows otherwise disenfranchised individuals to side-step the traditional barriers of mass communication. Therefore, the more access a country has to computers and to the Internet, the better it is for everyone — so they say.
That model doesn't necessarily hold true in the absence of the essential freedoms that have made the Internet a success in the US, however. Remember, China is a nation that still considers active political dissent — whether Internet based or otherwise — a criminal act. Just this year, four Chinese citizens were tried for subversion for having participated in a pro-democracy Internet forum, and more such cases are likely to arise unless we do something to discourage China's pattern of cracking down on Internet usage.
But we're not doing anything. Instead, Western corporations are gladly supplying China with the very tools it needs to maintain the status quo of surveillance and stifled civil liberties. And they'll continue to do so, as long as there's profit in it. As it turns out, despite its reputation as a disruptive force, the Internet isn't really that disruptive at all. Rather, it's adaptive — it conforms to whatever environment it's dropped into, even one under strict totalitarian control.
So while Chinese might become the most-used language on the Internet within the next few years, the majority of those Chinese speakers might be surfing a significantly different Web than the rest of us. A PC and a browser can give citizens of the People's Republic a window out to a wider, democratic world. It remains to be seen who's going to help them climb out of it.
