The Wild East: The Real Chinese Internet

It is well-known that the Chinese government strictly regulates websites and Internet services. Amongst the users, one can find groups dedicated to social and environmental cause, as well as prostitutes looking for clients. The government claims that it targets the later. Pornography is allegedly the most important reason for China's controls on the Internet, and not the recent riots in Xinjiang, and the possibility of demonstrations on October 1, when the People's Republic celebrates the 60th anniversary.

Yet there is another side to China’s Internet: that most of the 300m Internet users are under 30 and are very difficult to control.
Censorship is strong, with foreign websites like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook blocked. Domestic websites often censor themselves, keeping a close eye on news stories and blog post that may be considered sensitive.
But Chinese Internet users know how to use proxy servers and other technologies to get around the Internet blocks. Chinese government censorship works by making it difficult to access Western sites. It is not impossible.
Most Chinese net users don't particularly care as long as they can chat to their friends, play games, listen to music and watch videos.
Yet there is dissent.

Six bloggers were arrested in July in the southern city of Xiamen for publishing information about a rape and murder case where the alleged killer had connections to the government.
An internet campaign was organized, encouraging people to send postcards to the jail where the bloggers were kept. It may have been responsible for their release.
A similar campaign was launched to protest against the detention of an activist lawyer named Xu Zhiyong. He was released on Monday, August 24, 2009.

Others use Internet for darker purposes and developed the 'human flesh search engines'. These large groups of Internet users dig up any information they can find about a person who has done something considered morally wrong. Recent examples include the persecution of an advertising agency employee in Beijing. This man’s wife wrote in a blog that her husband was having an affair with another woman. Then she committed suicide.
They also targeted a Chinese student at Duke University in the US who supported the free Tibet demonstrators on her campus last year.
In both cases, the individuals' ID numbers and residential addresses were published on the Internet and the harassment continued offline.
The Duke student's parents had human faeces dumped on the doorstep of their apartment in China, while the advertising employee had to resign from his job and go into hiding to avoid the hate campaign.
As well as private individuals, corrupt officials increasingly find themselves targeted, as well as companies that pollute the environment or cheat consumers.

Millions of young nationalist Chinese, best known as ‘fen qing’ (literally “angry youth”), use Internet to promote Chinese sovereignty, campaign for foreign products’ boycott or against the independence of Taiwan on websites like Tiexue.net (Iron Blood).
They also write about what they consider as Western media bias against China, such as the Tibet issue, on sites like Anti-CNN.com.

Despite the censorship, the Internet is China's most open platform of public expression: for all its problems, it is the closest thing the country has to a free press