US Congressional Panel Tackles China’s Great Firewall, Seeking a WTO Intervention

The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) held a new hearing in Washington yesterday to discuss the “human toll and trade impact” of China’s censorship of the web – aka it’s Great Firewall (GFW) system. It comes at a time when the US is asking the World Trade Organization (WTO) to press China for greater transparency in its GFW, which blocks a lot of foreign social media as well as general sites that contain views and material that Beijing authorities consider ‘sensitive’ or ‘inharmonious.’

The CECC hearing, chaired by Senator Sherrod Brown, featured five witnesses who talked of everything from trade laws to political dissent. One of them, Alex Li, is a former Chinese national whose father was imprisoned for views expressed online about the ruling Party. But first, Mr Brown said of the GFW in his opening remarks (I quote from written statements, not the video that’s embedded below):

CECC chair, Senator Sherrod Brown.

This policy benefits Chinese domestic companies at the expense of companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube who are completely blocked in China. Companies whose business models rely on openness and transparency – are forced to be an arm of the Chinese government or turn their backs on 1.3 billion customers […]

In the absence of meaningful competition, copycat versions of Twitter and Facebook flourish in China and raise hundreds of millions of dollars, ironically, on our capital markets. For instance, in May of this year, Renren, China’s version of “Facebook,” raised $743 million in an IPO listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hmmm… I don’t think “copycat” is entirely fair. By that principle, America’s own Henry Ford is a ‘copycat’ of Germany’s Karl Benz, who was making some fully functional cars that could travel over 60 miles a full eight years before Mr Ford even built his first car in 1896. As we like to say on PO, screw the idea – it’s the execution that matters. Also, remember that Renren (NYSE:RENN) was winning the social media battle before Facebook even got blocked.

Anyway, despite that not very convincing start, the CECC hearing then got deeper into the truly sinister Orwell-meets-Kafka world of China’s opaque censorship superstructure.

Imprisonments, and Flights to Freedom

The first witness was Alex Li who recounted how his father’s dissenting articles, which he posted online using the free proxy software Freegate, got found out. It paints a picture of the GFW being a tool of control, rather than of the claimed purpose of keeping the web “harmonious” (to use a key propaganda phrase). Alex said:

The reasoning behind the sentencing was that my father published four articles, which were viewed 1,532 times and received responses from over 25 people. The court stated my father was guilty of “inciting subversion of state power and overthrowing the socialist system.” First of all, my father posted his articles on foreign-operated websites. Without a proxy, people in China could not visit them. In 2005, few people knew of and made use of proxy software. Secondly, I could not imagine a nation with 1.4 billion people would be overthrown by an article with 1,532 views and responses from 25 people. So, I believe the agents were just using this as and excuse to persecute my father.