The real problem of the fake news of “College grad kills impediment to business venture”
By Shi Zhe  [史哲]     [原文在这里]


This kind of fake news isn’t as bad as it seems:

Wang Mo [王莫] returned home to Guizhou to find work after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Beijing University this year.  He started up an educational website for youth and just when it was about to start producing some results, the provincial communications administration ordered the office which held the server for Wang Mo’s website to shut down.  The reason was “it was not authorized to be put on file.”  Educational websites must hold certification from the local education authority before this can happen.  Wang Mo applied unsuccessfully three times in the span of one month.  After seeking consultation, Wang found that in order to obtain certification, he could either pay a “special approval” fee of 1000 RMB, or satisfy the department’s veiled request for a “commission.”  At an impasse, Wang took a knife to the cadre in charge of registration approval in the provincial communications administration, which resulted in death.  

The key elements of this piece of “news” were truly eye-catching.  The entrepreneur was a recent graduate from Beijing University.  He was trying to make it on his own but ran into a greedy official in a hardened system.  The story has a dramatic ending based on irreconcilable problems with the official.  The most important part of this fake news, however, was the timing.  It came out just as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began implementing its policy of closing all unregistered websites across the country.  It is no surprise it attracted so much attention.  

Fake news in and of itself is nothing to fear.  The free flow of information has the ability to naturally purge itself.  Self-correction is a foregone conclusion.  What is more worthy of our concern is the reason fake news is created.  If a fake news item plays off of a current concern of society and this concern generates enough negative sentiment among the public, then it is likely to undermine social stability if not given proper attention.  This news of “College grad kills impediment to business venture” has these characteristics.  

The recent actions by the Chinese government to bring order to the Web probably has nothing to do with people starting their own businesses.  After all, whether it’s removing pornographic content or the regulation of domain names, these are under the auspices of individual government departments. In a certain sense, it is making amends for the failure to abide or even inability to abide by porous laws when the Web first developed in China.  It could be the case that this rectification has not taken into consideration the present realities of people’s livelihoods, or that it is too difficult to avoid unforeseen consequences.  

For example, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s special actions to clean up the Internet require the implementation of a black list system for Chinese domain name holders.  Those who do not pass the inspection will be shut down and their names put on the list.  This requirement of Internet data centers everywhere has actually instigated the peculiar creation of a hyperbolic “white list” system, meaning that all those domain names not on it are inaccessible.  The popular way to describe it is that the ministry’s campaign to clean up the Internet is to deal with each website one by one.  But as enforcement has evolved, it seems to assume the majority of websites are illegal, and [follows the logic of those who sought a political purge in the 1920s by saying]  “I would rather victimize 3000 innocents, than let one traitor go.”  

Differences in interpretation and implementation of various levels of this policy have probably implicated most legally run small and medium business websites as having illegal ties because they are being closed for the objective and subjective reasons of failing to have a license.  The Chinese Internet expanded to over 63 million websites by the middle of this year and since September 1000 websites have been added daily.  One reason for this proliferation is the relaxed supervision of the past.  If the new laws are enforced uniformly across the entirety of Chinese cyberspace, the danger it poses to the majority of entrepreneurs who build websites is perhaps overstated, but the psychological damage it has already created among them is irreversible.  

The task of cleaning up the Internet actually does not require the extreme measure of the uniform closing of servers, not to mention this goes well beyond the extent of their authority in regards to the hosting rights of Chinese Internet data centers.  A good example is the recent invalidation of dot-cn domains and if people want to register a dot-com or dot-net they have to do it from abroad.  According to statistics, within the first week of the ministry’s Internet clean up campaign, there were over 180,000 dot-com registrations, an increase of 1300%. 

China has the most complex regulatory system of the Internet in the world.  It uses the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State Council Information Office from above and the Internet police force, Internet data centers and operators below.  It involves many levels and with so much vested power, there is no reason it cannot be wiser and more effective than management systems abroad.  If the implementation violates the original intentions of the policies, then they are very likely to choke the Internet to death or incite public grievances.  This is something that requires the utmost attention of those responsible. 

NOTE: This is a translation of an editorial which first appeared in Southern Weekly on December 24, 2009.

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