Google announced today in a blog post that it has redirected visitors headed for google.cn to google.com.hk.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.

As someone based in both Beijing and Hong Kong for significant periods in the 2000s and has been asked to comment on Google-China previously, here’s a backgrounder with some basic questions I’ve answered for reporters about the issue.

• Google.cn servers are located within the borders of the PRC, and are subject to the ICP (Internet content provider) licensing scheme. Google had been self-censoring its search results to retain its ICP license. In the PRC, it is up to the operating entity to make sure it does not run afoul of the content guidelines put out by the authorities.
• This morning, California time, Google changed things such that traffic to google.cn started to be redirected to the google.com.hk site, in the simplified Chinese character mode. (Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters, while the mainland uses simplified. They are somewhat mutually intelligible, but it does require some adjustment in reading to  get used to the other system. More info here.)
• Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) while technically part of China, is completely separate in terms of free speech, expression and rule of law. (See “One country, two systems.”) After it was handed over in 1997 by the Brits, it has had its own chief executive and Legislative Council independent of Beijing. Rule of law is strong in Hong Kong, with PRC dissidents and naysayers operating freely and in the open.
• Hong Kong’s Internet service and content providers are not subject to PRC’s censorship regime. The Great Firewall of China also does not play a part in content coming into or out of Hong Kong with the rest of the world.
• Google.com.hk results are not censored to conform with PRC ICP guidelines because being located in Hong Kong, it is governed by HK SAR laws.
• Content between Hong Kong and the PRC *are* subject to filtering by the Great Firewall, because HK is considered outside the mainland’s domestic Internet. For that reason, even though Google.com.hk is not censored by Google, the HTTP stream (ie. Web traffic) going between HK and PRC may be interrupted by the Great Firewall, based on content. This is often seen as a “Connection reset” by the user.
• It is possible that in the future, the Google.com.hk domain name or Internet protocol address may be blocked as a whole, but they don’t appear to be so right now.
• While Google.cn Search, News and Images are now being redirected to HK, the Video, Music, Maps and Translate sites are not, and still seem to be hitting PRC domestic servers. (Google Music has gained notoriety because it provides free, legal downloads of popular music via top100.cn).

China’s just waking to the reality that Google.cn (now Google.com.hk) is now subject to the Great Firewall. Let the commenting begin.

To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.

Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.

China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:

• One is through massive domestic Web site content regulation through revokable Internet Content Provider licenses (ICP). Operators have to self-censor through technical or human means to please the authorities regarding general guidelines on taboo topics. Keywords are banned and discussion topics are forbidden. In some cases, explicit timely edicts are required, such as for significant June anniversaries, sensitive political meetings (People’s Congress) or poor construction standards in Sichuan earthquake zones. Even with these, China’s netizens have come up with clever tricks and puns to get around many of these automated filtering systems.

• The other is the Great Firewall, the blocking of what foreign Web sites China users can surf. The implementation is clever, in that restrictions show up as technical errors (connection reset, site not found/unreachable) and curb behavior through uncertainty and doubt about a site’s reach-ability, rather than fear. You don’t know whether it’s the Internet acting flaky, or whether a site is actually being filtered. Tech-savvy users can trivially circumvent this.

But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.

The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.

Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.

With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.

This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.

(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)

What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.

I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.

Then came the big one.

China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (“Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)

One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.

It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.

China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.

At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.

Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)

Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.

Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.

Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.

The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.

The 66-year-old Mr. Hu’s appearance before foreign reporters Friday was a rare move into the public spotlight for a leader who has long shunned it. Mr. Hu has never given a news conference in China or abroad.

From the BBC:

Hosting the Games showed China’s desire for peaceful global ties, he said.

His comments came amid apparent concessions by Beijing in a row over internet access for journalists.

More sites which had been blocked in Olympic media centres – such as that of rights group Amnesty International – were accessible on Friday, journalists said.

Here’s a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked. This is taken from some that were sent on a recent Great Firewall list, and some I’ve added.

• 西方媒体：(Western media)
• 路透社 http://cn.reuters.com/
• 维基百科 http://zh.wikipedia.org/
• 自由亚洲电台 http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/
• 美国之音 http://www.voanews.com/chinese/
• 华尔街日报 http://chinese.wsj.com/gb/index.asp
• 金融时报中文 http://www.ftchinese.com/sc/index.jsp
• 香港媒体：(Hong Kong media)
• 明报新闻网 http://www.mingpaonews.com/
• 明报月刊 http://www.mingpaomonthly.com/cfm/main.cfm
• 亚洲时报 http://www.atchinese.com/
• 亚洲周刊 http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/main.cfm
• 南华早报 http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/
• 南华早报中文 http://olympics.scmp.com/GCO_Simpchi_Index.aspx
• 苹果日报 http://www1.appledaily.atnext.com/template/apple/sec_main.cfm?
• 台湾媒体：(Taiwan media)
• 联合新闻网 http://udn.com/NEWS/main.html
• 中国时报 http://news.chinatimes.com/mainpage.htm
• 自由时报 http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/index
• NGOs
• Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org
• Reporters Sans Frontiers http://www.rsf.org (Chinese site unblocked only in Olympics media center)
• Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.org

This is actually quite remarkable for folks living in China. The “Big Three” NGOs that have been unrelenting critics of China have been reliably blocked for years. YZZK (Yazhou Zhoukan) and Apple Daily both in Hong Kong, have done some of the most critical journalism regarding China.
RSF, acknowledging the good news, doesn’t take much time to celebrate and continues to push hard.

“This partial lifting of censorship shows that the Chinese government is not completely insensitive to pressure. If the entire world had been pressuring China since 2001, even before these games were assigned to Beijing, the situation might have been different today. And perhaps imprisoned journalists would have been freed before the opening ceremony.

Let’s be clear though: these unblocked sites are still subject to the sophisticated keyword blocking system of the GFW, which looks at both URLs and the body of web sites. The sites above are no longer blocked, as a rule, but the content on the site might still trigger a block. On the plus side, it seems the keyword filtering of the GFW seems to be less sensitive than normal, but the big taboo subjects are still blocked quickly.

NBC Nightly News did a piece on the blocking yesterday (July 31). I was amused when Danwei‘s Jeremy Goldkorn was on camera demonstrating how to use a virtual private network and noted that living with the net nanny wasn’t that big a deal.

Goldkorn: “I don’t see that it’s really going to impede anybody’s work.”
NBC: “Do you think the foreign media is just whining a little bit?”
Goldkorn: “Yeah. Absolutely they’re whining.”

I suppose one could make the argument that leaving the restricted GFW “harmonized” Internet as-is would have given foreign journalists a real taste of what China’s Internet users deal with every day. Now, they get a freed-up, “special” Internet to do their job and this issue goes away for the next three weeks. The question is, after the party’s over, will any of the sites above stay unblocked.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/chinese/
• http://zh.wikipedia.org
• http://www.rfa.org (Radio Free Asia)
• http://www.atnext.com (Apple Daily HK, newspaper critical of Beijing)

These were all considered pretty firmly blocked for a long time, so it’s a pleasant surprise. Perhaps the cry of reporters in the Beijing Olympic Media Center finally made it through to the organizers that they should follow through on their promise.

Public relations-wise, putting a censored Internet in the press center simply seemed like a terribly dumb move. Yes, before the Olympics even start, why don’t you completely poke and upset the press corp and give them plenty of material for harping on human rights and censorship in China. Maybe they thought the journalists would be too busy writing about the bad pollution problems instead.

So for now, kudos to the authorities for opening up these sites, even though every indication is that the authorities will revert to pre-Olympic policies around October 17. John Kennedy suggested a betting pool as to when the sites will be reblocked. My bet: 8 hours and 8 minutes after the Olympic closing ceremony.

Let’s not forget though there are plenty of sites still blocked in China, including Tor Project, Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, AboutUs.org, and LiveJournal, for which Twitterer wangzhongxia could not help observing:

I don’t kno why Livejournal is a bigger threat to China than things like RFA mandarin edition

Sometimes you need a sense of humor to deal with the net nanny. 

“Working for the Olympics as an IT contractor, I recently moved to the Media Village (where all of the reporters live) and was surprised the there was no free internet. BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games) is charging a ridiculous amount of money for ADSL service: for

• 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
• 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
• 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).

That is for only one month! For extra features like a fixed IP? That costs an additional 450 RMB (66 USD). I just can’t believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!”

While I can imagine that it is “noise” for NBC and the big guys, it is not inconsequential for other news outfits.

I suggest someone be kind and bring an Airport Express or other Wifi router and share the Internet love.

Multiple sites of CNN (www.cnn.com, www4.cnn.com, edition.cnn.com) were the target of these attacks. NarusInsight Secure Suite (NSS) reported 2 different kinds of attacks going towards CNN – ICMP flood attacks and TCP SYN flood attacks. Interestingly the attacks had very similar signatures, e.g. an instance of a SYN flood involved the attacker distributing his packets across multiple source ports while sending exactly the same number of packets per source port). This can be expected given that the hacker group had made it easy for the novice who could download a script to launch the attack. The highest bandwidth attack seen by NSS was an 80 Mbps SYN flood attack, while the others were much less than that.

They seem to think that the DDOS attack was not successful, saying, “Fortunately, there were no large scale attacks and CNN.com was very much up and running.”

However there was widespread news of flakiness for a whole day, with China and US users finding timeouts and unreachable servers.

The downside is that Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) is still blocked, through the filtering of its “host header.” For the tech inclined, here are examples of the block in action showing how de: (German Wikipedia) works fine, but zh: does not:

SUCCESS

$ wget –header “Host: de.wikipedia.org” http://203.212.189.253
–2008-04-03 01:22:54–  http://203.212.189.253/
Connecting to 203.212.189.253:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite [following]
–2008-04-03 01:22:55–  http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite
Resolving de.wikipedia.org… 203.212.189.253
Reusing existing connection to 203.212.189.253:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 34452 (34K) [text/html]
Saving to: `Hauptseite’

100%[=======================================>] 34,452      38.0K/s   in 0.9s

2008-04-03 01:22:57 (38.0 KB/s) – `Hauptseite’ saved [34452/34452]

FAILURE

$ wget –header “Host: zh.wikipedia.org” http://203.212.189.253
–2008-04-03 01:23:02–  http://203.212.189.253/
Connecting to 203.212.189.253:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… Read error (Connection reset by peer) in headers.
Retrying.

It would be wrong to portray China as a tightly buttoned mind-control state. It is too wide-open in too many ways for that. “Most people in China feel freer than any Chinese people have been in the country’s history, ever,” a Chinese software engineer who earned a doctorate in the United States told me. “There has never been a space for any kind of discussion before, and the government is clever about continuing to expand space for anything that doesn’t threaten its survival.” But it would also be wrong to ignore the cumulative effect of topics people are not allowed to discuss.

It’s pretty tough to relate all the tech details in a literary magazine and I spent some time with Fallows in  Beijing Starbucks going over the nitty gritty. Hope to post the entire details sometime soon.

It may be that blocks are unwinding after the CPC 17th National Congress, or it could be a hiccup. Thomas Crampton, who has been unable to do video blogs from Beijing, will be happy to hear the good news.

The latest stats showed that Hong Kong and Taiwan contributors make up over 50% of the contributors. Dedicated PRC users who can get to zh.wikipedia.org by proxy and overseas Chinese make up the rest. A quick spot check also shows lots of the activity in zh: relates to pop culture and current events, such as Harry Potter (哈利波特－死神的聖物), Rain Man (雨人), Heart of Greed (溏心风暴), GiGi Lai (黎姿). This does not seem so different than English Wikipedia, and may well be what gets folks introduced to Wikipedia first.