What’s up with China’s internet bars during the 18th party congress?

There is a great deal of talk recently, in China and outside, about how state censorship of the internet has tightened during CCP’s 18^th party congress. Sina’s microblogging service Weibo reportedly have some new ways of blocking key words. Google services, including Gmail, were said to be unavailable on Friday, November 9.

With all the buzz about Weibo (see Sullivan’s new article on Weibo here), people seem to have forgotten an old passion -- China’s numerous internet bars. After all, that’s where lots of young people, rural, urban AND migrant, spend their leisure time (for a good book on youth and internet bars, see Liu).

To see what cyber police might have been doing with internet bars, I did a simple search on Baidu today. I typed in the Chinese characters for internet bars + cyber police + 18^th congress, like this: 网吧+网警+十八大.  It returned over 44,000 results. 

I read only a few results, but they were revealing enough. First was a short news item released on October 22, 2012. It was about how a district police station in the remote city of Baoquanling in Heilongjiang province "innovates methods of social management" in order "to safeguard the smooth openning of the party congress."  “Social management innovation” (社会管理创新) is a new term in the language of the state which I will not try to explicate here.  The Baoquanling police’s innovation was to install video monitoring software on the computers of local internet bars, which would supposedly make it possible for cyber police to monitor the internet bars from the cozy distance of their offices in their police station.

Clicking on the second search result opened the cyber police web site in the city of Mengzi in Yunnan province. Mengzi is in the southwest end of China while Baoquanling is in the northeast end. There seems to be some unintended (or intended?) symbolic meaning here, because between Mengzi and Baoquanling, China is pretty well covered from the north to the south. In any case, I tried opening the first item under the “Announcements” section. It required authentication and did not open. The second item opened and it was a news release posted on November 4, 2012. It announces in a few sentences that “to maintain stability during the 18^th party congress,” the cyber police section of the city public security bureau inspected local internet bars on November 2. Five internet bars were penalized for violating the user registration rule (patrons of internet bars are required to show ID cards. See original regulations here in Chinese).

Such violations are apparently rampant.  One item on the second page of my Baidu search results is a news story about internet bars in Hainan province. It reports that again, “to safeguard the successful opening of the 18^th party congress,” the police department of the Hainan province secretly inspected 80 internet bars in 15 regions of the province and found violations in 37 of them.  ID check was still one of the main problems, but there also seemed to be cases where internet bars might have uninstalled required filtering software from their computers, a practice that happens in other places too (which I have read about elsewhere).

So, Weibo is not all the story about internet control. Cyber police teams in even the most remote corners of China have been busy, cracking down on internet bars and monitoring the Chinese cyberspace to “maintain stability” for the 18^th party congress.