Explosion

Internet plays key role in China’s latest unrest

ALEXA OLESEN for the Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — The brawl between Han Chinese and Uighurs in southern China was scarcely covered by state media, but accounts and photos spread quickly via the Internet and became a spark that helped ignite deadly riots thousands of miles away in the Uighur homeland.

Even in tightly controlled China, relatively unfettered commentaries and images circulating on Web sites helped stir up tensions and rally people to join an initially peaceful protest in the Xinjiang region that spiraled into violence Sunday, leaving more than 150 people dead.

In China, as in Iran and other hotspots, the Internet, social networking and micro-blogging are playing a central role in mobilizing people power — and becoming contested ground as governments fight back.

In the Internet age, events in “places like Xinjiang or Tibet, which were always considered very remote,” can suddenly become close and immediate for people around the world, said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley.

Since the outburst in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, the Chinese government has blocked Twitter and Facebook, scrubbed news sites, unplugged the Internet entirely in some places and slowed it and cell phone service to a crawl in others to stifle reports about the violence — and get its own message out that authorities are in control.

Key-word filters have been activated on search engines like Baidu and Google’s Chinese version so that searches for “Xinjiang” or “Uighur” only turn up results that jibe with the official version of events.

That a fight in one part of China could impact a riot 10 days later thousands of miles away underscores how slippery fast-evolving communication technologies can be even for an authoritarian government with the world’s most extensive Internet monitoring system.

State media reports said only two people died in the June 25 fight between Uighur and Han Chinese workers at a toy factory in southern Shaoguan city. In the days that followed, however, graphic photos spread on the Internet purportedly showing at least a half-dozen bodies of Uighurs, with Han Chinese — members of China’s majority ethnic group — standing over them, arms raised in victory.

Expunged from some sites, the photos were posted and reposted, some on overseas servers beyond the reach of censors. Their impact was amplified by postings on bulletin boards and other sites.

Uighurbiz.cn, a site popular among Uighurs, carried an open letter over the weekend suggesting there would be revenge for the factory fight. “You’ve beaten Uighurs, killed Uighurs and perhaps never thought about the consequences,” said the letter posted by someone using the Uighur alias Yadkar.

A flurry of postings on another popular site, Diyarim.com, began calling for action in Urumqi. Diyarim’s founder, Dilixati, remembers one: “Gather at 5 p.m. at People’s Square. Young people if you have time come to the square.” The messages kept reappearing, and he called police to alert them and took the site off-line, said Dilixati, who would give only his first name for fear of reprisals.
Hours after Sunday’s riot, when police were still trying to pacify Urumqi’s streets, Xinjiang’s leaders went on TV to denounce Uighur separatists living abroad for using Diyarim and Uighurbiz to organize the disturbance.

That the riot occurred in Urumqi may be testament to its being the most-wired place in Xinjiang, a remote region of vast deserts and towering mountains that juts into Central Asia.

Mobile phone coverage is typically stable in the city and people use handheld devices to go online, said Dru Gladney, a Uighur expert at the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California. In Urumqi, “people have these technologies literally at their fingertips,” he said.

Elsewhere in Xinjiang, the best services are provided at closely monitored Internet cafes, where Uighurs may be less comfortable posting sensitive information, Gladney said.

Only a dozen years ago, when China was scarcely wired, details of the authorities’ brutal quelling of a similar protest by Uighurs in the city of Yining leaked out slowly and even today remain obscure. An official death toll of nine is disputed by exiled Uighurs and rights groups who say fatalities may have been 10 times that or greater.
Unplugging Internet and cell phone service has become standard practice for dealing with civil unrest. The government did so in March over worries about renewed anti-Chinese demonstrations in Tibetan areas.

Though officials usually prefer to keep silent about such tactics, Urumqi’s top Communist Party official, Li Zhi, told a news conference Tuesday that the Internet was deliberately cut off in parts of the city. He said it was done “in order to quench the riot quickly and prevent violence from spreading to other places.”
Such censorship does not quiet unrest for long, but instead ends up giving rumors more credence than they deserve, said Berkeley’s Xiao.

“The more you try to police the Internet, and delete information, the more those rumors become some kind of truth and people just pick what they want to believe,” said Xiao. “That’s the negative direct consequences of such tight information control.”

My dear friend JRapp is currently in Beijing interning with Caijing magazine, which brings this story that much closer to home. She tells me that people there don’t seem terribly concerned about the censorship – and that includes other Americans. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in my bedroom, texting friends, updating Twitter and scanning the internet for news stories about the goings-on in China, completely uninterrupted. And I’m nervous. From way over here.

Do you ever consider what happens when you can’t even trust the news? Sure, a lot of us complain that our news feed is slanted or missing facts. But then we can hit open-apple t (or the equivalent for PC users?), type ‘Chinese riots’ or ‘China Twitter Facebook block’ or perhaps more appropriately ‘Xinjiang’ or ‘Uighur’ in the Google search bar and pull up hundreds of different news articles. Read a handful from varied sources, and you’ve probably gained a fairly balanced perspective of what’s happening on the other side of the globe.

What happens when that trust and ability to search is gone? Do you sit back and wait? Do you protest more? Are you afraid? Or are you accustomed to it? After all, this isn’t new: SARS, anyone?

I have a million thoughts right now. I’m angry about how unconcerned many seem to be about these events. I’m worried about how bad these riots could become – it sounds like by withholding information, the Chinese government might actually be making things worse. I’m also reflecting on my reading of Fahrenheit 451 many years ago. As frightening as that book might have been, to me it seems that China’s extreme actions towards complete information control are even worse. Who knew the terrors of reality could overshadow those of fiction?

And that really just looks at the censorship side of this, never mind the extreme outbreaks of violence. I can’t help wondering…even though censorship is pretty alarming, what if this is the best step? After all, according to the LA Times article linked above, ‘There were signs that news of the riots had led to additional protests in other Uighur communities in Xinjiang province. State media reported that authorities dispersed about 200 demonstrators Monday in Kashgar, about 900 miles west of Urumqi.’ What is censorship worth? On one hand, perhaps blocking these sites can ebb the flow of violence. On the other, blocking these sites also prevents the spread of true, or ‘conflicting’ accounts.

What do you think?