Dictatorships, whether of the Left or the Right, rely to a great extent on their ability to suppress information. Technological innovations that began to sweep the world in the 1970s greatly reduced the ability of states to control the spread of information if they wanted to share in the economic benefits of that technology.
The advent of the Internet has raised the stakes considerably. This is most evident in Cuba and China — two Communist dictatorships that are both attempting to integrate the Internet into their economies while still maintaining rigorous censorship.
Both countries are losing that battle, but Cuba is the most successful — ironically in part because of the U.S. embargo.
Because of the embargo, there is only a single Internet gateway into Cuba, and that is through a satellite connection. As such the Cuban government is able to both a) control very rigidly who has access to the Internet (only 40,000 people currently have access out of 11 million Cubans) and b) the state is able to filter out anti-government sites.
As government spokesman Luis Fernandez told Wired, comparing the blocking of the Internet to the jamming of pro-democracy radio stations, “We need to do the same with the Internet because we can’t have things that undermine Cuban society. The Internet is used only for good purposes in Cuba.”
Not that Cuba’s filtering works particularly well — it does not. According to Wired.
Laptops donated by foreign friends are secretly plugged into phone jacks at work; Internet passwords are traded on a burgeoning black market; blocked Web pages are sent as text attachments; free Web-based e-mail accounts allow free speech; used components are pieced together with hacked software to create what locals call “Frankenstein” computers.
China, meanwhile, has provided Internet access to millions of people and as a result is finding it increasingly difficult to control the flow of information.
In a report published by the Committee to Protection Journalists, A. Lin Neumann outlined the problems China is having controlling the Internet. According to Neumann.
To promulgate the right information is the biggest challenge the Chinese government has ever faced. More than ever before, the Chinese government is involved in the single greatest experiment in controlling the Internet that anyone has ever embarked on in the world. Probably, they are losing the battle already and probably they will lose it in some basic way.
Two recent failed efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to control the news illustrate the problems the Internet poses. The People Daily official web site posted and then quickly withdrew an article about an assassination attempt direct at Jiang Zemin. The withdrawal came too late, however — the article was already being transmitted across China.
In the second, a deadly explosion killed 38 children at an illegal fireworks factory run by party officials. At first the Chinese government tried to downplay the explosion. The story quickly spread over the Internet, however, and the government was forced to be more forthcoming about the explosion.
As Neumann puts it, 5-10 years ago, “the government line would appear in the papers, and that would have been the end of it. The Internet has changed fundamentally the way information moves around China.”
While it has not been successful at censoring the Internet, neither can it dispense with it altogether since it sees the Internet and similar information technologies as playing a crucial role in economic development. As Y.P. Jiang, the deputy director of the online version of People’s Daily puts it, “Over the next 10 to 20 years the Internet will become the main form of publication for People’s Daily… We want to make a lot of money.”
Sources:
Cuba not so Libre with the Net. Julia Scheeres, Wired, February 23, 2001.
China losing battle to control Internet content, CPJ consultant asserts. Arnold Zeitlin, Freedom Forum, April 3, 2001.