[This post originally appeared at Asia Times Online on August 22, 2013 as "Denial Is Not Just a River in Egypt". I've expanded and clarified the original piece considerably, especially in material pertaining to Golden Shield and the Great Firewall, with the additions shown in red. This piece may be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]
The Summer of Snowden and Egypt has been an awkward one for the
liberal democratic ideal and the rhetoric of ''universal values'' -
and Beijing's inability to honor them - that have wrong-footed the
People's Republic of China so thoroughly in recent years in the
international arena.
Most recently, Egypt slid over to join Libya on the bloody bollocks
side of the political ledger, as the liberal panacea for the ills of
authoritarianism - millions of people in the streets voicing democratic slogans - was unapologetically and enthusiastically deployed
to support a military coup against a democratically elected government
and then initiate a bloody pogrom against Egypt's erstwhile rulers,
the Muslim Brotherhood.
There have been rather eye-popping attempts to reconcile the Egyptian
jacquerie
of 2013 with the optimistic vision that prevailed during the Arab
Spring - and differentiate the events in Egypt from the ''bad''
massacre in Beijing in 1989. A writer at a national US magazine
inadvertently illustrated the true crime of Tiananmen - its violation
of the law of neoliberal democratic optics:
The
Tiananmen Square massacre, on the other hand, defied its historical
context; that same year, Communist regimes across Eastern Europe fell
peacefully, and within two years the Soviet Union would also collapse.
Though the Tiananmen Square massacre happened before the fall of the
Berlin Wall, it became, in retrospect, an outlier in the historical
context of its era. And for this reason, the Chinese government's
killing of its protesters seemed especially outrageous.
Tiananmen wasn't just a massacre; it was a crime against the
zeitgeist!
Now
that Egypt 2013 has apparently surpassed PRC 1989 on the
massacre-o-meter, the Butchers of Beijing probably find it ironic
that, while the PRC has been subjected to an increasingly
anachronistic arms embargo by the West ever since Tiananmen, the Obama
administration currently finds itself incapable of formally cutting off
military aid to Egypt's new rulers. [1]
More
to the point, the Egyptian precedent will provide plenty of
ammunition to Chinese theorists who believe that the PRC formula of
political stability and cautious reform by fiat pays more dividends
than handing the future of the country over to let-'er-rip democracy.
The
case is already being made in the pages of China's state media, as
Global Times informs us:
A
Chinese associate professor on Tuesday cautioned that developing
countries should be vigilant against "democracy trap" in the wake of
Egypt's deadly clashes.
The remarks by Ding Long, associate professor at the University of
International Business and Economics, came in his article carried by
the People's Daily on Tuesday. ...
Democratization of developing countries needs a preparatory phase,
during which the development of the economy should be prioritized to
strengthen social organizations and civil society, Ding noted.
"Serious maladjustment of democracy may occur if developing countries
indiscriminately imitate the Western democratic model," Ding warned.
[2].
Self-serving advice by an authoritarian regime anxious to stay in power?
Certainly.
Good advice for countries looking at the real dangers of democratic
transition? Maybe.
There has been a lot of grim, informed attention paid by the
China-watching media to President Xi Jinping's willingness to dash the
hopes of liberal reformers with his relatively open determination to
enforce the CCP's favored norms of political stability and
organizational obedience, marked by a round-up of open society
activists, lawyers, and even, from the other side of the fence, a
Maoist activist eager to make the case for ex-Chongqing mayor Bo Xilai
as he headed for trial. [3]
Xi
has been remarkably active on the propaganda and ideology front.
Other than the ''China Dream'', one of the first fruits of the 18th
Party Congress was the ''mass line'' - in Xinhua's words, ''a
guideline under which CPC officials and members are required to
prioritize the interests of the people and persist in exercising power
for them'' since ''the CPC is facing a more complicated situation in
maintaining ties with the public, as rapid economic and social
development has resulted in conflicts between different social groups''
and "therefore, the CPC needs to build systems and mechanisms to
encourage its members to interact with the public and guarantee its
mass line principle," (according to Gao Xinmin of the CCP Central
Party School). [4]
At
the same time, the CCP propaganda chiefs put out a sternly worded
directive about the ''7 things not to discuss'', basically a laundry
list of liberal concerns like ''Western constitutionalism'',
''universal values'', ''civil society'' (''opposition to opening and
reform'' was also bullet-pointed, presumably to put devotees of Bo
Xilai on notice). Xi removed any doubt that he stood behind the
principle of party supremacy with an extensively reported speech to an
ideological work conference that urged party members to be more
pro-active in propaganda work, essentially promoting a vision of the
CCP as the glue that will bind a fracturing Chinese society and
worldview into a single instrument of national economic and social
development. [5]
Good luck with that, one might say, given the imbalances and frictions
within the Chinese economy and society and the Party's perhaps
terminal unpopularity, thanks to its addiction to corruption,
non-transparency, and impunity.
However, the Xi administration that took up the reins of power earlier
this year is preparing to confront some significant challenges, which
can perhaps best be met with a party apparatus rededicated to
self-preservation through unity, and not afflicted and divided by
liberal Chinese critics fixated on the CCP's myriad democratic
shortcomings.
Xi
and Prime Minister Li Keqiang recognize some serious structural
threats to Chinese development as yields from the old
export/infrastructure investment binge model dry up. The new regime has
haltingly signaled its desire to transition to a consumer-driven model
of economic growth, reform the
hukou (household
registration) system, curb the economic and loan-hogging dominance of
the PRC's overbuilt state-owned enterprises and, perhaps, even deal
with the dysfunctional model of local government funding through
runaway land seizure and real estate development that is driving
Chinese fiscal governance into a ditch - as soon as Bo Xilai has been
safely consigned to the dustbin of history.
However, all these reforms - if Xi and Li have the nerve to carry them
out - bring with them the prospect of social unrest. Access to credit
will become more difficult, enterprises will topple, people will get
thrown out of work, people coming out of school will have trouble
finding jobs, officials and other millionaires will scheme to protect
their dwindling bank balances or, try to stay out of jail or out of a
grave as the next corruption investigation blows through town to
distract and placate the unhappy masses during the wrenching
transition ... and the central government and party regime will want
to make sure that an anti-regime nexus of discontent, dissent,
factionalism, and opportunism does not emerge to oppose the central
government and its policies.
If
social and institutional forces amplify the voices of dissent within
Chinese society and even link street activists to disgruntled bosses
and millionaires and generals - which is what happened in Egypt and,
for that matter China in 1989 - and produce the ultimate catastrophe
for CCP governance: an elite split bringing forth a new Gorbachev,
Zhao Ziyang - or Bo Xilai.
To
an authoritarian regime, increased control is an end in itself.
However, the central government's hostility to political reform - and
its eagerness to pour scorn on the ostentatious reverence paid by
China's liberals to the PRC's (party written, People's Congress-rubber
stamped, and never-voted-on) national constitution as a piece of
political theater - may also signal that Xi Jinping is trying to seize
the political and security high ground in order to anticipate and
blunt resistance to his policies.
Since the PRC's ability to manage this transition is of considerable
importance to both China and the world, and given the negative example
of events in Egypt, perhaps a rethinking of the relationship between
political and social reform will make its way onto the world's agenda
if Xi and Li make a serious effort to pursue their reform quest.
If
American liberal opinion still has limited heartburn digesting 1,000
corpses in Cairo as a speedbump on the road to democracy, it will
probably have even less difficulty reconciling the Snowden revelations
with its persistent critique of authoritarian Chinese security
practices.
Nevertheless, the surveillance story has embarrassed several Western
governments by dropping more shoes than a footloose caterpillar as the
Guardian and Washington Post bookend the Obama administration's efforts
at damage control with carefully escalated revelations.
The United States appears to have been reasonably, if not
overwhelmingly, sedulous in avoiding the targeted collection of
communications between ''US persons'' within the US. That's supposed
to be the job of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI is
expected to clear a higher legal and evidentiary bar than the National
Security Agency before it avails itself of the universal wiretapping
backdoors mandated on US telecoms equipment by the CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) statute.
At
the same time, it has become abundantly clear that the National
Security Agency (NSA), whose statutory playground is non-US
communications, can also listen to anybody anytime in the United
States if the protections embodied in US laws and the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act courts fail, thanks to accident, design,
or the exercise of individual initiative, as they have apparently done
in several cases.
Add to that the NSA's unquestioned ability to view traffic transiting
the US or residing on the servers of US Internet service providers,
e-mail providers, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! and the like.
Add to that the extensive access to traffic and information that doesn't
touch the United States, thanks to the cooperation and information
sharing provided by the ''Five Eyes'' - the UK, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand, in addition to the US.
And then there is apparently an extensive cross-border hacking
operation to access digital resources from uncooperative jurisdictions
like China and Russia.
A
watershed was perhaps reached with the detention of David Miranda, the
partner of Glenn Greenwald (the Guardian reporter who broke the
Snowden story), in the transit area of London's Heathrow Airport. It
is difficult to conceive of a legally and strategically more
ill-conceived sally than using an apparently bogus reading of British
terrorism laws to detain Miranda and seize his electronics.
And it is difficult to conceive of an environment in which such a
blunder could be committed, inviting unwelcome speculation that the
surveillance and security apparatus is, despite government assurances,
really out of control, drunk with its own sense of power and
impunity, and given to the pursuit of arbitrary and illegal vendettas
against individuals to whom it has taken a dislike.
Add it all up, and the Snowden revelations have, as a second-order
result, painted privacy as a precarious privilege limited to US persons
by a constitutionally restrained and perhaps less than enthusiastic US
government, not a universal value affirmed to the world by the United
States in its role as champion of freedom and free expression.
This has provoked some mental calisthenics by Chinese activists in
their efforts to explain the qualitative difference between US and PRC
surveillance. One dissident addressed a police search and
confiscation of his ''probe hound'' - a device for detecting wireless
eavesdropping - from his luggage while traveling in China:
[...]These
things happened as the Edward Snowden revelations were attracting the
world's attention. The Chinese government seemed gratified, even
pleased. Look! The United States is no better than China, so let's all
just stop the mutual carping.
But let's not jump to conclusions. How comparable are the cases? Is it
conceivable that the United States would tell a citizen that he has
no right to a probe hound? In China, the government can enter any
space of any citizen anytime it wants. It is the ''counterespionage''
of citizens that is prohibited. [6]
In
the wake of Bradley Manning's 35-year sentence for Wikleaking, it
remains to be seen if the US State Department rolls out ''freedom to
engage in counterespionage'' as a universal human right.
The fallout from two upcoming civil suits against US-based computer
network equipment designer and supplier Cisco Systems will provide some
perspective on how effectively the ''universal values'' critique of
China's surveillance state survives the Snowden revelations.
The two suits, one filed in Maryland on behalf of democracy activist
Du Daobin and other Chinese dissidents, the second in San Francisco by
the Human Rights Law Foundation, an advocacy group friendly to the
Falun Gong (FLG), a China-based spiritual practice group, on behalf of
abused FLG practitioners, seek damages from Cisco's corporate head
office for its alleged culpability in customizing machines supplied to
the PRC's Golden Shield Project to assist China's Public Security
Bureau in pursuing dissidents.
The two suits have been bubbling along for several months, but
recently received a jolt of publicity as the Electronic Freedom
Foundation filed an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Du
Daobin case. [7]
The centerpiece of the Du Daobin case, at least in the public sphere,
is the infamous Slide 57 from a Cisco internal briefing from 2002,
which was rather belatedly leaked in 2010 and serves as Exhibit A to the
complaint. In full, the slide reads:
The Golden Shield Project: Public Network Information Security Monitor System
Stop the network related crimes
Guarantee the security and services of the public network
Combat ''Falun Gong'' evil religion and other hostiles
[Note: Statement of Government goals from speech government official
Li Runsen]
The regime's preoccupation with Falun Gong as a target of Golden
Shield is confirmed by a 2007 public statement in the Chinese media
(which the plaintiff's lawyers in the San Francisco case apparently
seized upon for a rather tortured interpretation of ''struggle'' to
link the PSB and the Golden Shield system and Cisco USA to
brainwashing and other efforts to completely suppress the Falun Gong)
that the Golden Shield Public Network Information Security Monitor
System is ''an extremely important project to attack Internet crime
and ensure the safety and service of the public network; in the
struggle with the heterodox Falun Gong religious teaching and other
hostile elements, it has already had an important effect. [8]
In
slide 58, the presenter describes Cisco's opportunities relating to
the overall Golden Shield project:
High starting point planning
High standard construction
Technical training
Security, operational maintenance
This does not appear to be terribly strong beer.
For perspective, the lengthy Cisco Powerpoint presentation described the
state of play and potential Cisco opportunities throughout the
Chinese public security apparatus. The Golden Shield was one
significant area of PSB investment - a massive digitization and
information systems integration program initiated in 1997 to bring the
PRC's information systems and enforcement into the 21st century, and
the ''Public Network Information Security Monitor System'' -
responsible for the FLG and other hostiles - was one of six tasks within
Golden Shield and is covered by one slide out of the 97 in the
presentation.
Slide 57 could be spun as development of defensive measures against the
proudly net-savvy and regime-unfriendly Falun Gong organization, not
an aggressive campaign against innocent practitioners.
After all, the Internet was at the core of the FLG virtual community
and its outreach, education, and growth strategy. E-mail had served as
the instrument for mobilizing a vigil in front of Zhongnanhai, the
Communist Party's headquarters in Beijing, in 1999 that excited the
anxiety of the CCP and the determination of then Party leader Jiang
Zemin to eradicate the group. In 2002, the year the Cisco slide was
prepared, Falun Gong practitioners hijacked the transponder on an
Asian communications satellite and beamed an FLG banner throughout China
for 15 minutes.
Even today, the FLG prides itself on its Internet skills and, in 2010,
it received a US$1.5 million grant from the US State Department for
development of its Internet censorship evasion technologies, Freesurf
and Ultranet. In its own submission, the plaintiffs declare that:
Prior
to the implementation of the Golden Shield, it was impossible for the
CCP or security authorities to effectively detect, identify, or track
widespread Falun Gong activities online. [9]
Interestingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
also did not
file an amicus brief on behalf of the case being pursued against Cisco
in San Francisco (perhaps because the lawyers' determination to seek
class action status for tortured FLG practitioners made that filing
look more problematic), even though the Du Daobin case rests its case
on the rather easily challenged assertion that Golden Shield's
essential identity is as an instrument of repression of political
dissent, apparently in order to spare the legal team the heavy lifting
of linking Cisco to concrete instances of customization for the
purpose of human rights violations. [10]
The EFF, although a highly effective and determined protector of
digital rights, made the rather annoying flub of misspelling ''Falun
Gong hostiles'' as ''Falun Gong hostilities'' throughout the brief. It
also conflated Golden Shield - the Public Security Bureau's massive
national internal surveillance, information aggregation, and data mining
network targeting domestic crime and dissent, basically what would
happen in the United States if the FBI had the capabilities of the NSA
without any constitutional restraints - with ''The Great Firewall of
China'' - the considerably smaller (but to Western journalists and
West-friendly dissidents
and content-hungry netizens absolutely infuriating) software regime
imbedded in international gateway and regional routers to detect and
block undesirable foreign content.
The Great Firewall is apparently not run as an exclusively
Public Security Bureau operation. As far as I can tell, it gets its
marching orders from the State Internet Information Office under the
State Council. A PSB official is a vice director of the SIIO and undoubtedly has a decisive voice there, but I
draw the implication that, in bureaucrat-speak, there are multiple
party/media/propaganda equities involved in deciding what gets blocked,
beyond the priorities of the PSB and its particular mission of tracking and trampling on crooks and
dissidents whose on-line activities rise far enough above the level of embarrassment and irritation to be criminalized.
The publicly identified architect of the Great Firewall of China, Fang Binxing, was a telecoms functionary who until recently served as head of the Beijing Telecommunications University. Fang openly defended the government's right to restrict the flow of information and has maintained a rather hapless public persona, getting pelted with shoes and eggs during his rare public appearances and shutting down his Weibo account after it became a target of non-stop invective.
On the occasion of Fang's announcement of his retirement from his post at BTU in July of this year, rumored to be because of cancer, Radio Free Asia--whose website, one can safely say, certainly served as the object of Fang's unwelcome attentions--gave him a valedictory that included the comment from a Chinese blogger that "For someone to do as he did was simply monstrous...He's sick and hasn't died yet and he's already cursed at, he's got cancer and everybody celebrates his impending death. As a general matter, cursing a dead person is not virtuous, but in this case intellectuals and netizens are unanimous; no one will condemn such behavior."
I might point out that Li Runsen, the architect of Golden Shield--whose statement of the objectives of the Golden Shield Public Information Security Monitor System provided the content for Slide 57-- was a heavyweight in the Public Security Bureau and has now moved onto a profitable second career in the security/industrial complex as a director of the Shenzhen-based China Security and Surveillance Corporation. As yet, apparently nobody has displayed the temerity to abuse Li on-line for equipping the authoritarian Chinese state with digital teeth and claws, let alone organize displays of egg and shoe-throwing at his rare public appearances.
Long story short, although persecuting political and religious dissidents is a
significant mission
both for Golden Shield
and for its public network monitoring operation (which, according to slide 4 of the Cisco presentation, is handled by PSB Bureau 11 and implemented at the various local levels--here's the site for Yantai), it's not the only job and the PRC apparently invested 3.7
billion yuan (US$604 million)
in Golden Shield to link together almost 2 million
computers to do a lot of cop stuff as well. [11]
Therefore, simply linking Cisco to Golden Shield without demonstrating customization of software explicitly designed to pursue dissidents--which seems to be the approach in the Du Daobin case--may not be an evidentiary slam dunk.
The Falun Gong complaint, on the other hand, seems to be richer in
smoking gun allegation of Cisco USA's culpability in modifying its
equipment specifically and overtly for the purpose of hunting down
Falun Gong practitioners:
71.
Defendants marketed to Public Security officers that its security
software was the ''only product capable of recognizing over 90% of
Falun Gong pictorial information.''
72. To achieve such a high success rate, Defendants identified and
analyzed Internet activity that is unique to Falun Gong practitioners
and used this activity to create unique digital Falun
Gong''signatures.'' These Falun Gong-specific signatures were
incorporated by Defendants into security software upgrades at regular
intervals to ensure Falun Gong activity was identified, blocked and
tracked.
Cisco is expected to argue that, thanks to a corporation-friendly
ruling by the Supreme Court concerning the ''Alien Torts Statue''
(which permits aliens to file civil suits for damages in US courts and
serves as the legal basis for both actions), US corporations (as
opposed to individuals) are not liable for overseas malfeasance unless
a relevant ''US nexus'' (which was not clearly defined in the ruling)
can be shown.
However, this is a civil, not a criminal case and, as O J Simpson can
attest, the evidentiary bar for initiating and winning a civil case is
considerably lower than for a criminal case. What exactly is a
''human rights violation'' and what is ''routine security practice'' is
in the eyes of the beholder - the court - and not subject to the
criminal standard of ''proof beyond a reasonable doubt''.
The EFF
brief is littered with ''suggests'' and ''plausibles'' and, in the
end,
its news release declares that there is enough ambiguity to justify, not preclude,
the court accepting the case and embarking on discovery:
Regardless
of whether Cisco "merely" sold surveillance and censorship equipment
to China or whether they customized this equipment to pinpoint
dissidents, it's clear that the place to decide this issue is a court
of law. The plaintiffs have a right to present their evidence and have a
court rule on the legitimacy of their claims. [12]
If
one or more of the cases goes to trial, perhaps enough damaging
information will be shaken out of Cisco during the disclosure process
to keep the legal ball rolling and even support other cases against US
manufacturers or Chinese entities and individuals.
However, the PRC leadership, as it looks at the travails of Egypt and
the single-minded US commitment to the surveillance regime, will
probably decide it is better to avoid the Egyptian example of rapid
democratic reform, embrace the US model of unrepentant expansion of
its information collection and processing abilities, and see little
incentive to alter its authoritarian behavior.
Notes:
1. See
CNN report, August 20, 2013.
2. See
Chinese professor warns of "democracy trap", Xinhua, August 20, 2013.
3. See
Journalists, Lawyers Targeted as Xi Tightens ControlChina Digital Times, August 22, 2013.
4.
CPC's "mass line" campaign not a short-term movement, News of The Communist Party of China, July 15, 2013.
5. See
here.
6.
When it Comes to Domestic Spying, US is no China, August 22, 2013.
7.
See US District Court for the District of Maryland case filing
here.
The EFF amicus brief is here.
8. See
here.
9. See
here.
10. See
Daobin v. Cisco Cisco's Legal Legerdemain Continues, Ward & Ward PLLC.
11. See
Xinhuanet.
12.
Cisco and Abuses of Human Rights in China: Part 1, by Rainey Reitman, Electronic Frontier Foundation, August 22, 2011.
