China
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- A country in East Asia. Official name: People's Republic of China.
- Region in East Asia comprising the areas governed by the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan).
- The civilisation/civilization of the Chinese people.
See also
- Chinese art
- Chinese capitalism
- Chinese contemporary art
- Chinese culture
- Terracotta Army
- Chinese counterculture
- When China Rules the World
- Social Credit System
- Tank Man
- Execution van
- Mass surveillance in China]]
China is one of the five countries on Reporters Without Borders' March 2013 list of "State Enemies of the Internet", countries whose governments are involved in active, intrusive surveillance of news providers, resulting in grave violations of freedom of information and human rights. All Internet access in China is owned or controlled by the state or the Communist Party. Many foreign journalists in China have said that they take for granted that their telephones are tapped and their email is monitored.<ref name=RSFSRS-March2013/>
The tools put in place to filter and monitor the Internet are collectively known as the Great Firewall of China. Besides the usual routing regulations that allow access to an IP address or a particular domain name to be blocked, the Great Firewall makes large-scale use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to monitor and block access based on keyword detection. The Great Firewall has the ability to dynamically block encrypted connections. One of the country’s main ISPs, China Unicom, automatically cuts a connection as soon as it is used to transmit encrypted content.<ref name=RSFSRS-March2013/>
The monitoring system developed by China is not confined to the Great Firewall, monitoring is also built into social networks, chat services and VoIP. Private companies are directly responsible to the Chinese authorities for surveillance of their networks to ensure banned messages are not circulated. The QQ application, owned by the firm Tencent, allows the authorities to monitor in detail exchanges between Internet users by seeking certain keywords and expressions. The author of each message can be identified by his or her user number. The QQ application is effectively a giant Trojan horse. And since March 2012, new legislation requires all new users of micro-blogging sites to register using their own name and telephone number.<ref name=RSFSRS-March2013/>
Skype, one of the world’s most popular Internet telephone platforms, is closely monitored. Skype services in China are available through a local partner, the TOM media group. The Chinese-language version of Skype, known as TOM-Skype, is slightly different from the downloadable versions in other countries. A report by OpenNet Initiative Asia<ref>ONI Asia, web site, OpenNet Initiative, retrieved 15 September 2013.</ref> says everyday conversations are captured on servers. Interception and storage of a conversation may be triggered by a sender’s or recipient’s name or by keywords that occur in the conversation.<ref>"Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform", Nart Villeneuve, Information Warfare Monitor and ONI Asia, 1 October 2008.</ref>
On 30 January, the New York Times reported that it had been the target of attacks by the Chinese government. The first breach took place on 13 September 2012 when the newspaper was preparing to publish an article about the fortune amassed by the family of outgoing Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. The newspaper said the purpose of attacks was to identify the sources that supplied the newspaper with information about corruption among the prime minister’s entourage. The Wall Street Journal and CNN also said they had been the targets of cyber attacks from China. In February, Twitter disclosed that the accounts of some 250,000 subscribers had been the victims of attacks from China similar to those carried out on the New York Times. Mandiant, the company engaged by the NYT to secure its network, identified the source of the attacks as a group of hackers it called Advanced Persistent Threat 1, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army operating from a 12-storey building in the suburbs of Shanghai that had hundreds, possibly thousands, of staff and the direct support of the Chinese government.<ref name=RSFSRS-March2013/>
