China's Hu vows to 'purify' Internet (Reuters)

I can see the way this was all handled in the Western press and, indeed, I believe it was the second speech Hu made on the subject in a fairly short period of time. However, I have yet to see anything in the words Hu has actually spoken that pertain to censorship.

Let me first give my own slant on this one. China has good guys and bad guys. The good guys, the reformers, have little or nothing to gain, often much to lose, by certain practices - in this instance censorship and media control - being conducted. The bad guys, such as the propaganda department, (recently renamed the 'Public Information' department I believe), are utterly reliant upon the continuation of such bad practice for their livelihood and, indeed, the maintenance of their considerable levels of power within the system. Thus they are anti-reformist.

I count Hu amongst the good guys.

What follows is a theory which has played well here in China with those I've discussed it with, but even if it is wrong it is indicative of how things could easily be played out here. Early in Hu's period of office the media began to open up. Journalists - cautiously - began to break scandals and were not censured. Things were looking good. Then suddenly, apropos of nothing much I could see, there were demonstrations against the Japanese in major Chinese cities one weekend which, over the following week or two, were clearly being organised to escalate into demonstrations in as many urban areas as possible.

What was very odd about the organising of these demonstrations, some of which became violent with Japanese businesses and individuals being attacked, is that they were initially organised in internet chat rooms monitored by the propaganda department there to prevent, amongst other things, the organisation of mass demonstrations for any cause. For understandable reasons, unruly mobs give the leadership the jitters; whatever their initial cause they can readily turn against local government organisations of which many in the crowd would have been victims of corruption or injustice or just plain hubris. Beijing panicked as it became evident that these demonstrations were set to spread dramatically and suddenly there was a clamp-down. The demonstrations never happened. And 'coincidentally', though it had nothing to do with the cause of the demonstrations, the propaganda department went back on full power over the media censorship and then some.

The conspiracy theory, then. The Chinese are well schooled into certain emotive channels from infancy through the media and education system. The Japanese, Taiwan, the oil in the South China Sea; these serve to 'unite' the people against a common enemy and ensure the continuing power of organisations such as the PLA, itself involved in much of the media monitoring, particularly the internet. I think what happened in them thar chat rooms was not merely the tolerant acceptance of the organisation of demonstrations by the chat-room monitors but their actual organisation by the monitors themselves. A power play. 'You're taking our power. That alarms us. Watch it. We can mobilise people in a way you won't like. Power back on please, Mr. Hu.' And power back on was what they got.

I'd like to make two important points about this as a theory. First, as a potential mechanism for a power play it is undeniably there, latent and potent. Second, I really can't see how the initial chat room organisation of the demonstrations was even possible without the assistance of monitors from the propaganda department. This is not such a crazy theory.

So what, then, was Hu talking about? With seven years' experience of the Chinese internet I think it's fairly obvious. It's something of a cesspit. Indeed, I sometimes feel that the Great Firewall might do well running both ways so that things from inside China don't get out any more than things outside China are permitted to get in. The main official line when it comes to censorship is that it prevents pornography, and yet my ISP recently, should I try to access a blocked site, would cheerfully give me a Chinese web page that was obviously considered politically neutral which featured prominently photo sets of scantily-clad young Chinese females. These females may be found too in direct links from the widely-used - indeed, utterly pervasive - Chinese chat program QQ; you're unlikely to find many school children who don't have a QQ number. QQ permits access to free music while you chat, and I doubt that the western artists featured get royalties. Baidu, the main Chinese search engine, has a link to the usual web, image, news searches but also a link on that list for mp3s. Again, I doubt the plethora of Chinese hosted web pages that offer these free downloads pay the western artists anything for the privilege. If someone wants to watch the latest movie they're pretty much guaranteed to be able to download it readily and rapidly from a Chinese source; and bear in mind here we're talking about people who mainly want Hollywood who don't speak English well if at all. It has to be Chinese sources given that subtitles or dubbing are required. Chinese web sites, including some of the most established, feature all kinds of very extreme drive-by nasties, QQ often sends my virus checker into hysteria and the program I actually used to connect to my ISP in one place - Dr. Com - was rejected as a virus by several virus checkers which, in spite of several alerts as to false alarms, never seemed to get taken off any virus checker's watch list. Viruses are so pervasive on the mainland indeed that it's pretty much given that any memory stick plugged in in a net bar or the work place will, as often as not, contract something.

Knowing that it's worth reading Hu's remarks again. The Chinese internet does indeed need purification, but not from western and seditious influences. It needs a lot of cleaning up when it comes to purely home grown abuses internal to China itself.