Preparations for the most important anniversary in China in the twentieth century are stretching further than polishing nuclear weapons and strapping sharp implements to the necks of soldiers with bad posture.
By the time 30,000 politicians and persons of indisputable guanxi gather in Tiananmen Square tomorrow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, innumerable sexual health and HIV websites will already have been shut down. During a summer of race riots and mass organised ‘forgetting’ the Great Fire Wall went into over drive in an effort to clean up their online presence in time for the scrutiny of the world’s media.
On 1st July the Chinese ministry of health issued a decree to systematically start banning public access to websites with sexual health content—unless you are a medical professional or scientific researcher. The rules appear intentionally vague. What exactly is covered by “scientific research” is ambiguous. The penalties, however, are crystal clear: a fine of up to 30,000 RMB (£2,772), or in some cases prison.
In the same month, the government also announced plans to introduce Green Dam onto all new computers: a software which automatically filters out any sex-related content in an internet search. This includes medical and HIV websites, chat rooms on health channels, and the highly-publicised pornography which China Daily, that bastion of truth, claims is poisoning the minds of China’s children.
In light of the violent riots between Han Chinese and Uighurs in Xinjiang province in June, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Fanfou (the Chinese version of Twitter) and sites like Chinasmack.com have been blocked. But closing access to the few sources of reliable sexual health information risks severing an information lifeline for millions of people.
Although Green Dam was put on hold when the government came up against the World Trade Organisation, Google and angry netizens who refused to have their web usage tamed, it has not been abandoned and looms shadow like on the horizon.
Sex is taboo in China
“Sex is still a taboo subject and there remains very low levels of knowledge,” says Carl Wang, an employee of the NGO Prevention Through Education. In August their website, HIVzx, which offers online sexual counselling and medical advice was shut down without warning. “Sites like ours are very important, because in China people won’t talk about sex in public. We get emails asking if HIV can be left on bed sheets. Because it is associated with needles we hear from people refusing to go to hospital out of fear. The lack of knowledge is sometimes terrifying.”
However, Professor Pan Suiming, director of the Institute of Sexuality and Gender at Renmin University in Beijing, is unsurprised by the sudden rash of closures. “From the moment you are born in China you are controlled. By your parents, then your teachers, then your university and sitting above all of them is the government. This is not an accident. No one in China has any privacy regarding their private or sex lives. The government doesn’t trust us to make our own decisions and there is an expectation that they have the right to know what we’re up to, especially on the internet.”
The government don’t trust us to make our own decisions
What is staggering, however, is how anyone goes about policing the way 1.3bn people use the web. Two years ago China Daily reported that the government had issued a call for “comrades of good ideological and political character, high capability and familiarity with the internet to form teams of web commentators who can employ methods to actively guide online public opinion.” They call them the wu mao dang, the 50 cent army: hundreds of thousands of faceless propagandist bloggers whose occupation is to infiltrate and manipulate internet forums which criticise party policy on Tibet, the suppression of statistics on bird flu, the jailing of protesters, the lack of laws protecting homosexuals and, of course, sex education.
With the manpower at the wu mao dang’s command (an estimated 300,000), the potential damage they could inflict by targeting sites like Wikipedia, Digg, Google News and YouTube is cause for concern. Their ability to popularise certain stories and to shout down others is incalculable. One incentive, which also explains their name, is clear: every very time they post a comment or alter a thread the individual is paid the equivalent of 50 Chinese cents (£0.046).
On the eve of the anniversary, the atmosphere in Beijing is dark. Every single hotel room with a view of Tiananmen has been booked out by the government- not for them the same mistake twice. And the only way the public will get to see the parade is on television. Tourists are being forced to carry their visas on them and there has been a sudden mass exodus of expat residents to Hong Kong “for a holiday.” But for HIVzx and thousands of other websites, the countdown is on to see if they will be reinstated after the event, or if this was the start of something far more sinister.
[previously published on Prospectmagazine.co.uk]
UPDATE:
Listen below to the Guardian’s Beijing correspondant, Tania Branigan, on today’s anniversary:
The Chinese news organisation, Danwei, put together a collage of how China's media celebrated the anniversary
