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The Internet in China 111“network security.” It specified in broad terms the types of “harmful information”and “harmful activities,” such as hacking and spreading computerviruses. In 1999, the State Encryption Management Commission, in cooperationwith the SSB, promulgated the “Administration of CommercialEncryption Regulations” which required all network encryption products andequipment to be approved because they are regarded as state secret.In 2000 alone, six major regulations regarding state secrets, online businessoperation, information and news services, and Internet security were issued(Cheung, 2003: 79–82). The new rules primarily targeted Internet contentproviders (ICPs). They required, among other measures, online news disseminatorsto get special licenses, prohibited foreign companies from being largeshareholders of Chinese ICPs, and required bulletin board (BBS) and chatroomsystem operators to record user information (including content postedonline, account name, duration online, Internet provider address, accessingphone number) for at least 60 days to facilitate police work. Regulations at thenational level were reiterated, sometimes in stricter terms, in the managementpolicies of regional networks and commercial websites (Qiu, 1999: 12),reflecting a “business culture of self-censorship” (Cheung, 2003: 85).Administrative measures are used to ensure that the system of regulationhas teeth (Cheung, 2003). The MPS and the SSB have set aside special taskforces at national, provincial, and municipal levels, including full-time cyberpoliceand “state information security liaison personnel (guojia xinxi anquanlianluoyuan).” Many of these cyber-cops are college students who are subsidizedfor computer and Internet access by working part-time for law enforcement.26 There are also numerous system operators, webmasters, and BBSboardmasters who are required to share the labor. If they do not cooperate,penalties include temporary or permanent closure of their forums (Qiu, 1999).On the technical front, China is known for its notorious “Great Firewall”which blocks access to harmful information, broadly defined, perhaps as manyas 10 percent of the websites on the World Wide Web (Zittrain and Edelman,2002). The state agencies also apply advanced intranet and tracking technologies,as well as content-filtering software, in the so-called “Golden ShieldProject” (Walton, 2001). Since 1998, dozens of cyber-intruders have beentracked down and imprisoned on charges of disclosing state secrets, incitingsubversion, Internet hacking, propagating Falun Gong, and, more recently,spreading rumors during the SARS epidemic. These men and women aremostly in their late teens to early 40s, and include private IT entrepreneurs,schoolteachers, college students, and unemployed urbanites. From September2002, the blocking mechanisms became more sophisticated and aggressive.They specifically target certain online content (for example, an article atnytimes.com about Chinese corruption scandals, but not other sections of theelectronic newspaper). Those who attempt to access outlawed information via