p2p news / p2pnet: “The Internet, even censored with U.S. corporate help, is fundamentally altering China’s one-party state,” says the Chicago Tribune.

“In the span of barely a decade, the Communist Party has lost the monopoly on knowledge. China’s ranks of 111 million Web users have grown nearly 20 percent from a year ago.”

With dedicated and on-going paid-for help from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and others, China is desperately trying to gain total control over who sees, and does, what online and, “The government is adept at curbing expression, sometimes brutally, with prison terms of more than 10 years for unlawful political speech,” states the story.

But beyond the “dutiful newspapers, the censored films, the Google-scrubbed search pages” is a, “shadow marketplace of ideas in which Chinese citizens are finding, watching and reading a growing share of what they want”.

China’s estimated 30,000-strong cyber cops, “troll for sensitive Web sites and chat postings to remove,” continues the Chicago Tribune. “Yet the censors’ task has barely begun: 92 percent of China’s population has yet to go online.

“Censorship opponents are getting savvier too. Chinese Web users who want to elude China’s firewalls can now choose from a range of online services with names such as Freegate [see the bottom of the page] and UltraSurf. Though they are difficult to use, the sites funnel Web traffic through third-party computers, allowing Web users in China to view sites and send messages that otherwise are blocked.”

Meanwhile, “the only reason we watch the (state) television version is to find how different it is” from the uncut version, Silicon.com has Shanghai Ye Shannan, 23, saying, adding:

“For young people like me, you don’t need to worry. We can basically find all the programs that we want.”

Also See:
Chicago Tribune – Net-savvy easily evade China’s censors, April 17, 2006

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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

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