By CHRIS BUCKLEY 8:01 PM ET
HONG KONG — Behind closed doors, Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, held up
the Soviet Union’s collapse as the risk of wavering from traditional
ideology.
昨天與兩位持台胞證的朋友談天。他們認為中國如果能在法治上和資訊控制上改善,那它對台灣的統戰力就幾乎無可擋。不幸的是,前者恐50年內不為功,而後者對學術研究能力有損 (其中有人不知道紐約時報對溫家寶家族的不義之財的報導不知道,而他的中國女友覺得百度是萬能的……)
今天華爾街日報有一則報導說互聯網的控制,損愛中國的商業。情況大約如此: 某瑞士客戶將其要傳往中國廠商的檔案以其家鄉地Falun命名,這當時都傳送失敗,原來它與法輪功. Falun Gong同名.
China's 'Wall' Hits Business
Firms Say Censorship Slows Web Connections, Curbs Access to Services
BEIJING—Fredrik Bergman ran into a problem when a
client in Sweden tried to transfer files to his firm's headquarters
here: Each time, the firm lost its Web connection for an hour or so.
After several weeks of multiple outages a day, he says, the firm solved the puzzle: the files were named for the Swedish town of Falun, where the client was working. Mr. Bergman says his firm thinks the name triggered the filters China's online censors use to block discussion of Falun Gong, a religious group long banned in China. Once the files were renamed, the transfers went smoothly.
"We had up to a thousand floor plans supposed to be delivered every
day," says Mr. Bergman, whose firm, Diakrit, produces virtual tours and
three-dimensional models for housing developments. "To have two or
three breaks a day for a few weeks...was affecting us a lot."
His Internet-connection woes mounted, however, so Mr. Bergman closed
up in 2010 and moved his business to Thailand, where he says his
connection is fast and reliable and he has access to popular
social-media outlets like
Facebook
FB +2.12%
and Twitter. "I can finally use the iPhone as it should be used," he
adds. "These kind of small things make a difference for an IT company
with staff who love technology."
Experts say the blocks that keep Chinese users from accessing services like Facebook, Twitter and
Google Inc.'s
GOOG +0.63%
online-video unit YouTube, are hurting businesses, slowing their
traffic and hindering their use of a new generation of cloud-computing
services like those offered by Google.
Akamai Technologies,
AKAM +1.50%
which provides services to help websites speed up connections, says
China's average connection speed ranked 94th globally in last year's
third quarter, well behind Asian rivals like Malaysia, at No. 71, and
Thailand, at No. 58.
European Pressphoto Agency
The same Internet controls that
inconvenience individual Chinese users like these, at an Internet bar
in Beijing last year, are proving a burden to business.
The American Chamber of Commerce in
China said last year that nearly three-quarters of about 300 businesses
it surveyed said unstable Internet access impedes their efficiency.
About 40% said China's censorship efforts have a negative business
impact.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State
Council Information Office, which regulate China's Internet industry,
didn't respond to requests for comment.
Analysts say one of the main problems for business is that the Great
Firewall, the nickname for China's Internet-censoring and filtering
technology, kicks in every time a computer in China tries to access a
website abroad, slowing down the connection.
The government also has failed to build infrastructure that would
allow for quicker connections overseas, said David Wolf, a managing
partner for the China practice of market consulting firm
Allison+Partners.
"What they prefer is that Chinese users decide it is just too much
trouble and by default use onshore sites, or sites that are mirrored
onshore," he says.
Google, which started routing searches to Hong Kong in 2010 to avoid
the mainland's restrictions, remains available in China, but its
services here have become increasingly unreliable over the past year,
which experts attribute to censorship efforts.
But China's own websites are fast enough that TV shows streamed online by video sites, like those run by
Youku Tudou Inc.
YOKU +6.73%
and
Sohu.com Inc.,
SOHU +2.48%
can play locally without interruption.
AKAM +1.50%
China continues to keep a tight grip on the Internet even as it seeks
greater openness with the world in other ways, striking deals to buy
foreign brands and developing its own cultural exports, such as movies.
The lack of easy access to Internet services like Facebook and Google
that the rest of the world takes for granted could reduce China's global
competitiveness, experts say, and put it at a disadvantage when
competing for top talent.
Discontent has risen in recent months
as Chinese authorities appear to have ratcheted up their censorship
efforts amid a once-a-decade change of top government leaders. "It is an
absolute nightmare," said Shaun Rein, whose consulting firm, China
Market Research Group, employs about 20 analysts in the country.
Mr. Rein, who has been doing business from China for 13 of the past
16 years, uses Google's small-business services to store and share
documents and for internal communications.
But increasingly unreliable connections to Google in recent months
have hindered downloads and sharply reduced the effectiveness of
instant-messaging service Google Chat, he said. Unstable connections to
Google's Gmail service have forced Mr. Rein to set up a system that
forwards his email to multiple services to ensure its delivery.
Google has said it hasn't found any problems with its systems.
"The real question is whether the next administration is going to
continue to roll back Internet availability to foreign firms," Mr. Rein
said. He said companies are unlikely to pull out of China in any case,
but they likely will think twice about moves like shifting their
regional headquarters to Beijing from places like Singapore and Hong
Kong. "They will still invest in China," he said. "It just depends on
what scale."
Stepped-up censorship efforts in recent months include a crackdown
on so-called virtual private networks, or VPNs. While companies use
commercial VPN services routinely for secure data, foreigners, China's
elite and other tech-savvy users can use personal VPNs to leap the Great
Firewall to use services like Facebook.
But it is illegal for foreign companies to operate a VPN in China
without a local partner, according to lawyers and state-run media, and
several VPN services say their access has been blocked increasingly in
recent months. In a departure from previous practices, the blockages
have continued even after the recent transfer of power to a new
generation of Chinese leaders.
Danvers Bailieu, a spokesman for VPN provider Privax Ltd., said the
U.K.-based company also has been the target of denial-of-service attacks
from China in recent months. He added that the government has been
closing ports used by VPNs, and that the company has maintained services
by switching to new ports each time an old one is closed.
"We think [the crackdown] is damaging: consumers don't like it," he
said, adding that the company provides services to business travelers,
university professors and students in China.
In December another VPN company, Astrill Systems Corp., based in the
Seychelles, said in a note to customers that blocks were doing "a lot of
harm to business in China."
China's censor also have stepped up their scrutiny of foreign media
websites following a series of articles last year on a scandal that led
to the fall of former Communist Party star
Bo Xilai
and on ties between business and politics among China's top leaders.
The Wall Street Journal's Chinese site has been blocked at times over
the past year, while sites run by Bloomberg News and the New York Times
remain blocked.
Last month, the government angered China's thriving software industry
by blocking GitHub, which offers software developers a site where they
can store, write and collaborate on software-coding projects. After an
outburst of criticism on the country's popular microblogging service,
Sina Corp.'s
SINA +4.31%
Weibo, the government relented, unblocking the site.
Alex Miller, a China-based entrepreneur who founded a
Web-TV startup called Frogo, says he supports the way the Great Firewall
has helped keep out Western competitors, allowing Chinese Internet
companies to develop. But blocking GitHub, he said, was a step too far.
"This is where all the open-source projects are stored. This is
access to the world's source-code knowledge," he said, adding, "By
blocking GitHub they're going to stifle a ton of innovation," he said.
Write to Paul Mozur at
paul.mozur@dowjones.com and Carlos Tejada at
carlos.tejada@wsj.com