BBC published an interactive map showing the growth of broadband
connection from 1999 to 2011.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8255695.stm

Canada seems to be the earliest country that the broadband is populized. In Asia, South Korea is the early bird, even earlier than Japan (Let’s utter a deep sigh for North Koreans).

It is really a great archievement for China – although until now maybe just around 10% of inhabitants in China are using broadband, don’t forget that means more than 100 million… while at the same time let’s sigh again out a greater thing in China: GFW.

Plus, see the submarine broadband cables, Hong Kong is definitely a hub of communication to the world, as it has always been for more than 100 years.

Thanks Carolina Rossini for passing on this map via Berkman’s mailist.

The first webpage(cn) of BLawgDog was published on 26 August 1999. I didn’t expect how big the Internet would impact the world in the following ten years. I also didn’t expect the Butterfly Effect of that webpage to my own life. It was just an small outcome of my curiosity plus some inner desire of communication. But without it, I might not start my way out of the beautiful hometown, my life in Beijing and Hong Kong, and my connection to the hub of cyber research – Harvard Berkman Center – my bio page as a fellow is occasionally and nicely published by Berkman colleagues on 26 August 2009. That is a fantastic gift for BLawgDog, as well as a new start.

Rule of Moral or Rule of Law? Contending Passions of China’s Information Control in the New Round of Metropolis Development

DONG Hao

This is an outline of my presentation prepared for a Symposium.

Lust, Caution is a movie telling a story in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1940s. I personally like it because it has not only good scenery but also some artistic, as well as sexy episodes. From the law perspective, the interesting thing is: This movie, especially those episodes with nude bodies may not be protected by China’s copyright law because Article 1 of that Law said that it aims to promote the development of ‘spiritual civilization’ but not indecent content, and Article 4 of the Law excludes the copyright protection to ‘illegal works’.

Therefore, if someone uploaded the movie to a website in China, the copyright holder might not eligible to sue the uploader for the copyright infringement. On the other hand, if the copyright holder licensed a website to provide the online watching, both the holder and the website might confront with criminal penalty no matter what warning signal had they placed on the website before the visitor could see the movie. The worse thing is no instruction in China’s law revealing what is obscene or indecent.

The history of China’s endeavour on controlling the information can be described as a contending between rule of law and rule of moral. Until currently, the controlling is mainly based on the judgement of the officer’s moral feelings (this includes the traditional moral or the so called Socialist Spiritual Civilization). Why? Because the law is very vague and uncertain.

The more complicated thing is: Some local government tends to carry out the Rule of Moral in name of Rule of Law. In Hangzhou, a new regulation has just promulgated, it says basically anyone who wants to post a thread onto BBS or any public discussion system must register her real name and citizen ID card number to the ISP beforehand.

Why do they believe this controlling will be useful? Not only because they don’t understand the technology (if one want, he may break any firewall), but also because of the Chinese legal tradition. Traditional Chinese social controlers used to embedding, or implanting literary or even passionate wordings into the legislation or policy. For example, many officers use ‘Internet violence’ to support their suggestion to the above real name system. However, the Internet Violence is just a metaphor. There is no possibility to conduct a legal prohibited real ‘violence’ through the Internet. The only things that may happen are defamation, invasion of privacy or leaking the state secrets, which are far away from the ‘violence’ in the legal sense, such as battery, trespass or body harassment.

As Aristotle had said, ‘the law is free from passions’. Good information governance should be under rule of law. The rule of moral might be efficient in some circumstances, but may also lead to many arbitrary administrations.  For example, there is a 2007 case in Shanghai on the blocking of the website. The plaintiff made a website hosting at a US web server. The website was purely lawful under Chinese law. However because the whole server was blocked afterwards, his website cannot be accessed from China. (Brief the case)

Contrasting to the mainland, the passions or pure moral doctrines are scarcely written in Hong Kong’s legislations directly. Comparing with Mainland, Hong Kong has a more precise and value-neutral law on the information controlling. In the Edison Chan’s obscene photo case, Hong Kong government firstly tried to determine, in accordance the fixed procedure, whether the photos were consistent with the definition of ‘obscene’ or ‘indecency’ regulated in Obscene and Indecent Articles ordinance (Ch. 390 of HK ordinance). The moral criticisms to the author or the uploader of those photos always stayed in the media, and are not concerned by the judges.
The bright aspect on mainland China is: now the controlling is gradually stepping into the pace of rule of law. A good result of recent campaign of attacking indecent content in China is that a semi-governmental organization published 13 standards for distinguishing the indecencies from other contents. It has its defects because the most important thing: procedure of determination is still lacking. However, it is a good start (while the future may still a contending of rule of moral and rule of law).

Between the mainland and Hong Kong, the most essential distinctions are not the buildings, human resources and industries, but the distinction between rule of moral and rule of law. Either of them has advantages for specific cases, while I think as for a general environment, stressing the rule of law would be crucial  for China’s new round of development in metropolis. If Shanghai wish to be a financial centre or regain its glorious status that we can see in the movie Lust Caution, it has to be a safe harbour for everyone with clear and stable rule of law.

Yesterday, a post calling for a joint blocking of IP addresses belonging to governmental networks, copyright organizations and national gateways was published in “V2EX.com“. V2EX is a famous web 2.0 Chinese community, which is believed to be blocked by G.F-W recently. This website, built by Livid Torvalds (Liu Xin), an excellent programmer born in Kunming, provides discussion boards service in a creative way. This new “BBS” attracts a great amount of visitors in a short period.

V2EX is believed to be blocked on 5 September under a storm of Internet Controlling. It remains not clear that which department of China’s government is in charge of the whole action, while perhaps the storm is mainly for “creating a stabilization” before the 17th National Congress of Chinese Communist Party.

The author of the post suggest Chinese individual webmasters collect IP addresses of governmental networks, copyright organizations, judicial organs and other networks or servers may be employed to operate the so called “G-F.W”.

THIS IS A BAD NEWS. Because this implies a possible upgrade of the tension between government and netizens. The similar upgrades have happened before in China, and some of them led to tragic finales. Fortunately, the calling in this post may not be successful since it is very hard to define which IP address should be banned, and a joint activity is too difficult to be practiced. Nevertheless, from the legal perspective, to ban any access to one’s own website dose not violate the law, unless a new law claims that [b]any visisting[/b] from IP addresses in governmental network shall not be denied accessing to any database. If this becomes true, nothing can be better than leave the jurisdiction of such law because that is really an irreversible upgrade, i.e., “Matrix Reloaded” comes true.

I hope it never happens.

In most legal Internet Cafes in mainland China, one has to provide his / her “real name card” when he / she hopes to login on a computer and surf the line. The name, resident ID number and other information are integreted in these cards and they are granted by some goverment angencies. The government officers seem believe these cards can prevent the breach of the law when internet users surfing the line.

Everyone except some Chinese Netizens in this planet has known for a long time: blogspot is blocked by China, then why do I choose it hosting my English blog?

Choosing Blogspot, I may get very limited visitors from mainland China. Although it is an English blog, I believe most of entries here are more attractive to those people in China – either speaking Chinese or English – than in anywhere of the world.

Choosing Blogspot, I may encounter difficulties when I tried to post entries or manage my blog. Most of my business stays in China until now, which means most of my life may be spent in China. I may not so easy to access my own site when I am back to my hometown.

Am I such a freshman who just begin blogging? No. My homepage has been launched to the Internet near 10 years, and I have been involved in the study of Internet Law (Cyber Law) over 5 years. I’ve read perhaps every provision of Chinese Internet regulation, and I have observed most of important events in the history of the Internet governance by Chinese Government.

Am I such a young radical activist? No. From my knowledge, no one will really win in a political debate. If there must be a winner, he / she must be the stronger. And furthermore, I don’t, and I am not capable to, care about the so-called democracy and other political issues. I just hope to feed myself with my professional knowledge.

Am I intended to publish the rubbish and spamming the Internet? No. I am a lawyer. A lawyer will not be so stupid to leave evidence even when he was compelled to do something perhaps illegal. While my blog is of a purely legal one, at least according to the existing Chinese law. No unsolicited message, no pornography, no drug abuse, no Child sex, no privacy violation, no piracy, no violence, no terrorism, and of course, no threaten to the national / international security. Plus, I am planning to add “no smoking” and “no snore”. My blog focus on academic and professional topics, even my personal hobbies are banned by myself. So if a government bans this site because of its content, the reason should only be: there are some contents here.

Then why I choose Blogspot, a blocked hoster?

Because my responsibility to the Chinese people? No. I wish I were so patriotic, but I always disappoint myself by falling into the daily work. I have to confess that each time when I saw my friends are using those outdated web services, I feel sorry. But I don’t and cannot be their father. When people ask me questions about the new applications in the Internet, my answer are normally simple and selfish: search and try them by yourself.

Well, enough, there may be other mistaken answers. I’m tired to explain more. Now let me release the correct simple answer:

Because I have registered a Google account, and its service is good enough for me.

The Internet is the tool of my work and the toy of my relaxation. I don’t hope to be the slave of my tool and toy. If a tool is good enough, why do I choose another? My computer was bought 6 years ago. It still can run software what I need, so I don’t buy a new one. My first website was based on a simple template of FrontPage (an old Microsoft software) and published in 1998. It is replaced till 2003, because it cannot satisfy my needs of upload new entries every day. My Chinese blog was set up in 2005, it runs well but the technical support is poor, so I may change to another some day (God knows when it will be).

Similarly, Google’s services are not bad, I enjoy using Gmail, Google reader and other applications with a sole account. And most importantly, its services are updating. I don’t want switch to another service provider. I need a pure English blog service which is stable and is compatible to my Chinese site. Blogspot is enough.

You may say a blocked Google is nothing. But how can you predict which is the next one? The trend is: when a new website is good enough to attract Chinese visitors, it is facing the fate of blocking. The cases of Flickr and Feedburner, the unblock of Technorati has proved that the blocking is extremely arbitrary. I will not discuss the legitimacy of the blocking in this essay. And I may never discuss this topic in the future since I don’t used to discussing a topic on which the academic conclusion is useless to the legal practice. What I am talking about is a common sense:

If each line is possible to be cut off, why do I waste time to find and study a line that I haven’t touched before?

Actually, in my BlawgDog.com, an English channel (so just click here if you are in mainland China) has been set up from the very beginning. Because the blog system I used is based on Chinese, the pages in this English channel still includes many Chinese buttons. So what I need is just a blog service that may be used to establish a pure English branch to perfect my BLawgDog.com, Blogspot is enough.

Again, Google has provided what I want, and what I don’t want was not conducted by Google itself. If I choose other sites, I am doing a censorship too, and this self-censorship can’t help me since it can’t prevent my hoster being blocked tomorrow morning.