Research Fellow  Christopher Griffin

The Chinese government has never much enjoyed the Internet age. It employs a nationwide bureaucracy, including countless local "Internet cop" branches, to maintain the "Great Firewall of China" and prevent the seepage of information that may harm the interests of one-party rule in Beijing. This effort has allowed the government to monitor most of its citizens' online activities, block politically offensive Web sites and maintain press censorship in defiance of the millenarian predictions about the Internet from just a few years ago.

The challenge facing China's Internet cops is immense. According to official statistics, China has nearly 140 million Internet users, roughly equal to the population of Russia. To make matters more complicated, the government calculates that half of these digital denizens are spending most of their online time on video sites, where the challenge of censorship can be complicated by the scarcity of such easily searchable keywords as "Tiananmen Massacre" or "Taiwan independence," and where the consequences of a rapidly transmitted video can be far more destabilizing than an online petition or still image.

The most popular Chinese video-sharing site today is "Tudou," which, according to AC Nielsen, accounts for half the video-sharing market in China, with 40 million regular visitors who watch more than 1 billion videos each month. Tudou has taken a soft self-censorship approach, employing an army of volunteers to monitor its videos and report anything that may draw unwanted attention from the authorities. The consequences for Tudou's content are stunning. Except for reposts of news broadcasts from the state-owned media, no videos on the site concern military affairs, and a search for the word "protests" (kangyi) turns up only a handful of videos, mostly of "patriotic" demonstrations against Japan. This level of censorship may suit Tudou's interests, but it does not appear to satisfy Chinese video-sharers, many of whom have sought out international sites such as YouTube to post their videos.

Not surprisingly, much of the Chinese video fare offered on the Internet is served with a hearty side of nationalism. One popular topic for video sharing is China's regular schedule of military exercises, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's "Peace Mission 2007 Anti-Terrorism Drill, which involved about 6,500 troops from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Half of the 10-day exercise was conducted in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region, where the long restive Muslim Uyghur population was clearly on the receiving end of a warning about the consequences of disloyalty to China.

Another popular topic for Chinese video posters is military hardware, reflecting the fact that this has long been considered a field in which Internet users can dabble without raising topics likely to offend the authorities. For example, "ChineseKungFu01" at YouTube describes himself as a 19-year-old from Hong Kong and has posted videos with stunning photos of mock-ups and artists' conceptions for the J-12, a fifth-generation fighter that has been in the early design phase for several years and that China's airpower advocates hope will compete with the F-22 Raptor.

The risk in sites such as YouTube for the Chinese government is that although Beijing can easily exercise censorship and bully companies into exercising self-censorship at home, it has little control of international content, leading to a new "digital divide" between Web sites that are approved for viewing within China's Great Firewall and those that must remain outside. Not surprisingly, YouTube is filled with far more material that criticizes the Chinese government for its human rights violations than celebrates its growing military.

Indeed, the Chinese government's many opponents seem to understand the importance of online video in getting their message to the world. Although Tudou may not have a single video showing domestic Chinese protests, YouTube has dozens. These include the September 2006 protests in Ruian, a city in Zhejiang province on China's eastern coast, where thousands of citizens took to the streets to denounce the apparent cover-up of a young teacher's death. The protesters and censors engaged in a furious tit-for-tat last year as they respectively posted and banned a video of police beating civilians, until the clip finally made it past China's grasp onto YouTube and other international Web sites.

Although the Chinese government, likewise, devotes tremendous resources to censoring any news and Internet content related to Taiwan, it has difficulty controlling all messages that harm its position. Taiwanese advocates for independence use the Internet to post videos defending their positions and also to bait Chinese officials into the type of hostility that bolsters the independence argument. Taiwan's current campaign to gain a seat at the United Nations has featured dozens of telegenic rallies that have ended up on sites such as YouTube, and when a Chinese health official sneered to reporters during the 2003 SARS crisis, "Who cares about you Taiwan people," the video made the rounds on the Internet immediately.

How will China respond to video sharing? The only way the current regime's commitment to censorship allows it to: Censor better. The government has repeatedly threatened to block YouTube from Chinese servers, and YouTube has correspondingly announced plans to launch a China-specific site. One should expect such a China-focused version of YouTube to undertake the type of self-censorship that American audiences would never accept and that such companies as Yahoo and Google have already undertaken to do business in China.

The censorship solution is not good for the U.S. or the Chinese people. The very nature of Internet video sharing creates pressures for a limited number of hubs, unlike the widely networked nature of blogging. Although refusing to compromise its principles may limit YouTube's access to the Chinese market and lead to the occasional demarche from Beijing's officials, it is valuable that Chinese citizens such as those in Ruian have ready access to an international site where their story can be told.

Christopher Griffin is a research fellow at AEI.