The cellphone revolutions (NYTimes)

April 25, 2005
A Hundred Cellphones Bloom, and Chinese Take to the
Streets
By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING, April 24 - The thousands of people who poured
onto the streets of China this month for the
anti-Japanese protests that shook Asia were bound by
nationalist anger but also by a more mundane fact:
they are China's cellphone and computer generation.

For several weeks as the protests grew larger and more
unruly, China banned almost all coverage in the state
media. It hardly mattered. An underground conversation
was raging via e-mail, text message and instant online
messaging that inflamed public opinion and served as
an organizing tool for protesters.

The underground noise grew so loud that last Friday
the Chinese government moved to silence it by banning
the use of text messages or e-mail to organize
protests.
It was part of a broader curb on the
anti-Japanese movement but it also seemed the
Communist Party had self-interest in mind.

"They are afraid the Chinese people will think, O.K.,
today we protest Japan; tomorrow, Japan," said an
Asian diplomat who has watched the protests closely.
"But the day after tomorrow, how about we protest
against the government?"

Nondemocratic governments elsewhere are already
learning that lesson. Cellphone messaging is an
important communications channel in nascent democracy
movements in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Ukraine's Orange Revolution used online forums and
messaging to help topple a corrupt regime.

Few countries censor information and communications as
tightly as China, which has as many as 50,000 people
policing the Internet. Yet China is also now the
largest cellphone market, with nearly 350 million
users, while the number of Internet users is roughly
100 million and growing at 30 percent a year.

The result is a constant tension between a population
hungry for freer communication and a government that
regards information control as essential to its power.
Anti-Japanese protesters have been able to spread
information and loosely coordinate marches in a
country where political organizing is illegal.

"That has to put the government on guard," said Xiao
Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the
University of California at Berkeley. He said the
recent organizing effort was even more notable because
no one had been able to identify any of its leaders.

To be certain, these protests may not be a reliable
predictor of any future popular movements. They
basically endorse Communist Party policy, rather than
challenge it. Public antipathy for Japan has made it
easier to mobilize people. Perhaps most significant,
the government sent signals for weeks that the public
interpreted to mean that the marches were "politically
safe."

But the scale of the protests did seem to surprise the
government. There is no doubt that underground chatter
created momentum.

"Chain letter" e-mail and text messages urged people
to boycott Japanese products or sign online petitions
opposing Japanese ascension to the United Nations
Security Council. Information about protests,
including marching routes, was posted online or
forwarded by e-mail. Banned video footage of protest
violence in Shanghai could be downloaded off the
Internet.

"Text messages, instant messaging and Internet
bulletin boards have been the main channels for
discussing this issue," said Fang Xingdong, chairman
of blogchina.com, a Web site for China's growing
community of bloggers. "Ten years ago, this would have
been unthinkable."

In Shanghai, the local police even sent out a mass
text message to cellphone users the day before that
city's raucous protest. "We ask people to express your
patriotic passion through the right channel, following
the laws and maintaining order," the message said.
Some marchers saw the message as a signal to proceed,
while others took it as a warning.

In early 2003, text messaging and the Internet played
a major role in helping people pass reliable
information - and also unfounded rumors - about the
outbreak of SARS at a time when the government was
covering up the disease.

In the anti-Japan protests, people have sent
old-fashioned chain letters to friends via e-mail or
text message. Typical is a 23-year-old professional in
Shanghai who asked to be identified for this article
by her English name, Violet. She uses an instant
messaging service on her work computer to communicate
with 50 people on her "contact list."

Before the Shanghai march, one person on Violet's
contact list sent her links to vote "no" in online
polls about Japan joining the United Nations Security
Council. Violet voted and then forwarded the links to
more than a dozen other people on her list.

She also received an instant message to join the
Shanghai protest and recruit others. But she said the
day before the protest, her cellphone buzzed with the
mass message sent by the Shanghai Public Security
Bureau. She decided not to march.

The next day, though, friends on her contact list sent
Internet links to photographs of the protest that were
banned in newspapers. Even her boss took a look.

"He said, 'O.K., look at the pictures but do not
forward this,' " Violet said. "My boss does not want
to be involved in political issues."

Others in Shanghai learned of the march from an
Internet posting that included a suggested route for
the march and tips like bringing dry food and not
bringing Japanese cameras. Some people wondered if the
government had planted it online.

In the past, the government has shown it can tighten
monitoring of these technologies. Security officials
are thought to be able to track a person's whereabouts
by intercepting cellphone transmissions.

The government began cracking down on people using
these technologies to foment anti-Japanese protests
more than a week ago, before the Shanghai march.
According to an employee at a major Internet provider,
the government on April 14 ordered all Chinese Web
sites to begin filtering anti-Japanese content. Then
last week, several anti-Japanese Web sites were shut
down because they were trying to organize new protests
in May.

One Western analyst in Internet technology said the
government has powerful filtering devices that can
screen cellphone and e-mail messages. This filtering
technology can separate messages with key words such
as Falun Gong, the banned spiritual group, and then
track the message to the person who sent it.

Falun Gong, in fact, used cell phones to coordinate
protests until the government deemed the group a
threat and launched a crackdown.

"There are things the bureaucracy could do if it found
this sort of communication truly threatening," said
the Internet technology analyst, who has studied China
for more than a decade and asked not to be identified.

Yet many analysts agree that screening the Internet
and cellphones is far more difficult than the practice
of simply ordering state-controlled newspapers or
television stations to censor a subject.

One reason is that a growing number of young Chinese
have multiple e-mail accounts, including some with
providers based outside China that are not filtered.

In an informal test last week, the words
"anti-Japanese protest" were typed into an online
messaging service. The response was: "Your message
contains sensitive or uncivilized words. It cannot be
sent. We are sorry." Similar problems arose with
Chinese e-mail accounts. Yet the same phrase went
uninterrupted via cellphone text messaging.

About 27 percent of China's 1.3 billion people own a
cellphone, a rate that is far higher in big cities,
particularly among the young. Indeed, for upwardly
mobile young urbanites, cellphones and the Internet
are the primary means of communication.

"If people can mobilize in cyberspace in such a short
time on this subject," said Wenran Jiang, a scholar
with a specialty in China-Japan relations, "what
prevents them from being mobilized on another topic,
any topic, in the near future?"