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Tibet: China's Cyberspace Media Campaign

Posted on: Thursday, 27 March 2008, 09:00 CDT

As police and protesters clashed in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, the internet seemed to become a parallel virtual battleground for the conflict between the Chinese government and the movement to free Tibet from Chinese rule.

Apart from its military response on the ground, Chinese authorities are said to have responded to the media with a range of strategies including a clampdown, a public relations offensive, and cyber attacks on activists, to counter bad publicity in the run-up to the Olympic Games.

The current unrest began on 10 March, the anniversary of a failed uprising in 1949 that forced the Buddhist country's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, into exile.

Media clampdown and manipulation of content

In the wake of the unrest, China appears to have implemented the methods honed since 1998, when its Operation Golden Shield (often referred to as "the Great Firewall of China") was launched, and which is said to employ 30,000 staff to fight a cyber war.

Filtering technology enables authorities to block all traffic containing a key word such as "Tibet", or "Dalai Lama", for instance. China is also known to use Internet Protocol blocking (denying access to an IP address) and other censorship technology.

A massive media clampdown was imposed over the weekend of 15-16 March. News sites such as Guardian online were blocked, as was YouTube which featured video clips of violent clashes between police and protesters. (China unblocked YouTube and the BBC News website - but only the English-language site; not the Chinese - on 25 March).

On 18 March, it was reported that China had launched "a sustained publicity offensive". The Guardian's news site reported that "after days of ignoring and then playing down protests, the media suddenly switched course [on 17 March]. TV channels aired hours of Friday's anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa and the aftermath. Employees of the state television service CCTV's English service were instructed to keep broadcasting footage of burned-out shops and Chinese wounded in attacks. No peaceful demonstrators were shown."

Domestic video-sharing sites show bias

A similar trend was evident on the internet. China's domestic video-sharing sites, such as 56.com and pomoho.com, also carried the CCTV footage - but not the video clips seen on YouTube. All Tibet- related videos on tudou.com posted in March are cultural programmes. Search results on youku.com include a few clips of Premier Wen Jiabao answering reporters' questions on Tibet at a press conference on 18 March. A search for the Chinese word for "Tibet" on 56.com brought up no results. An error message says, "Sorry, no results related to 'Tibet' was found". On ouou.com, all Tibet-related videos in March were clips from a documentary about Tibet made by a Chinese filmmaker. No videos promoting the Dalai Lama or Tibetan independence were found on Chinese video-sharing websites.

On 31 January, China's state media regulator had imposed tough new rules governing the control of audiovisual content on the internet. According to a notice posted by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT), only state-controlled entities holding a three-year broadcast licence have the right to operate websites containing professionally published audio-visual content. The regulation is widely seen as a move by China to restrict online videos to state-controlled sites, and to require internet providers to delete and report content. In February, about 50 video-sharing sites based in China were forced to sign a "self-discipline agreement".

Tudou.com, which had refused to sign the SARFT "agreement", was offline for 24 hours on 14 March. (Tudou streams more minutes of video each month than YouTube. This means that tudou users interact with their site more than YouTube users do with theirs, not that tudou has more traffic/viewers). Tudou administrators attributed the shutdown to a problem with the server but observers claimed it had been shut down by SARFT to check for Tibet-related content. The co- founder of Tudou, Marc van der Chijs, made no mention of the shutdown, or indeed any reference to the Tibet unrest, in his blog Shanghaied (www.marc.cn).

Matt Whitticase of the Free Tibet Campaign told UPI from London: "[The Chinese authorities] are seeking to isolate the protesters both on the ground and on the internet".

On Guardian Unlimited Blogs, Matthew Weaver wrote on 17 March: "China is attempting to seal off Tibet from outside scrutiny as part of a crackdown on anti-Chinese unrest, as its ultimatum passes for protesters to hand themselves in by midnight."

Counter-offensive on the internet

There is a considerable body of content on the internet (including blogs, comments and video) that is pro-China/anti-Tibet and criticises the Dalai Llama. The essence of this content is that:

- Tibet has always been part of China, it is not a separate, occupied state. References are made to the US's incorporation of Hawaii or the colonization of Australia.

- Tibetan protesters were violent and Chinese police were restrained in trying to contain a riot. Ethnic-Chinese were killed and injured.

- Western media distorted and fabricated reports on events.

- The CIA (and Western governments) are imposing their agenda in Tibet and the CIA trained and armed the Tibetan resistance. There are claims about the Dalai Llama, too, depicting him as part of the CIA operation, or as a stooge of the West.

These themes are dealt with, for example, by the video clips "Tibet WAS, IS and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China" uploaded on YouTube on 15 March, and "Seven Lies about Tibet and His Holiness", uploaded on 26 March.

They say the Dalai Lama presided over a slave society, and juxtapose black-and-white pictures of pre-1950s poverty and "slavery" with grand, colourful images of development under Chinese rule. The text running over the pictures contains many grammatical and typing errors, as well as swear words. The same video clip has been uploaded onto Metacafe, another video-sharing site.

"Seven Lies about Tibet and His Holiness" uploaded by a user called ilovetibet81 (who joined YouTube on 25 March and posted the video on the same day) is stylistically strikingly similar

a series of stills images, with superimposed text and a backing music track.

Attacks on Western media

In a volley of postings, one video was uploaded by several users ("dionysos615", "Tibetan72", "Maohammet", "dalaiClique", "CNHabs", "nusub", "ChinaFreund", to name a few) under several titles, such as "Why China blocked some western media???" and "Riot in Tibet: True Face of Western Media". The video dissects Western media coverage of the riots to "show how pictures are modified, misjudged purposely by western media to slander China", according to the superimposed text. For instance, it disputes references in western media to "Chinese police", saying the uniforms are those of Nepalese police. (A scene it claims to be a misrepresentation by the BBC which refers to a military operation but the video claims is a paramedic/Red Cross operation - clearly carries an AFP logo).

Most of the subscribers who had posted the video had joined YouTube between 15 and 25 March. The profiles cast little light on the subscribers, and are in many cases curious (when compared to other YouTube profiles which usually give the subscriber's age, country of origin, and often details of interests and background). For instance, the profile box of Tibetan72, contains the legend: "I came from west China, my hometown is near Tibet. I love China and now I'm studying in Europe. China is a country of 56 nationalities. We are living very happily together. The Tibetan got freedom since the government abolished the slavery society under the rule of Dalai Lama ...

"Dalai Lama is actually a political loser, a liar, a terrorist. He wants to bring Tibetan back to the terrible slavery fate!

"Go to Tibet, go to 2008 Beijing Olympic, got to see a true China!"

The provenance of the YouTube video clips cannot be ascertained and many raise questions (if the users are private individuals, as they purport to be) in terms of access to resources such as archive images and world media in many languages. Stylistically, they are very similar in form and content.

In response to Tibetan72's video, "Tibetan slaves under Dalai Lama's rule yelling for FREEDOM!" (uploaded on 22 March) "Minoozola" commented: "What a bunch of crap this video posted by a Chinese agent is".

The pro-Tibet/Dalai Lama movement, on the other hand, has been using the internet for many years. The London-based Free Tibet Campaign (www.freetibet.org) was set up in 1987 (and its website has archive items dating back to 2002). The New York-based Students for a Free Tibet (www.studentsforafreetibet.org) was set up in 1994. The International Campaign for Tibet (www.savetibet.org) is 20 years old and has offices in Washington, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. There are also many recent postings on the internet, on all forums, from supporters of a free Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

Cyber attacks on activists

Free Tibet Campaign's Matt Whitticase said advocates of the Free Tibet movement had been targeted for cyber attacks he was sure originated in China. He said he and other activists regularly receive emails with attachments which purport to relate to their activities, such as a flyer about a meeting, but which contain malicious software. "Most of them are easy to spot because they contained obvious spelling or other errors," he said.

Source: BBC Monitoring Media

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