The land that brought the world the Great Wall has built a new barrier on its frontier. Like its predecessor, it is designed to repel invaders and protect China from their foreign ideas.
Dubbed "the Great Chinese Firewall", it is a series of Internet blocks and filters meant to stop Chinese citizens from seeing online news and opinions that differ from the government's political line. But just as the miles of mud and stone erected centuries ago failed to keep China's citizens in and invaders out, current day computer experts are finding ways through this barrier.
They call themselves "hacktivists," electronic guerrillas with a political agenda, ranging from ending censorship to outright sabotage.
With names like Bronc Buster, Cult of the Dead Cow and the Hong Kong Blondes, they sound more like rock bands than enemies of the people. But the Chinese government is taking them seriously.
They claim to have defaced government web sites, torn down firewalls and disabled a satellite, and to possess the tools to infiltrate government computer networks. They have linked up with political activists who want to challenge the government.
"We are computer experts, and above that we like the concept of free speech," said the Chinese editor of VIP Reference, an electronic magazine based in Washington that is emailed into China. The Chinese-born editor uses the English alias Richard Long to protect his family at home.
"We are destined to destroy the Chinese system of censorship over the Internet," declared the editor. "We believe that the Chinese people, like any other people in the world, deserve the rights of knowledge and free expression."
VIP Reference contains exactly what the filters are meant to keep out: articles and essays about democratic and economic evolution in China. The name itself is a play on the Reference News, a publication with similar content but for top cadres' eyes only. Editors say VIP Reference is for China's real VIPs - ordinary people.
Editors have found one easy way to get around the Internet roadblocks, which can stop access to specific Web sites, but find it more difficult to screen private email. The group distributes the pro-democracy magazine throughout China with shotgun blasts of email, to about 250,000 addresses compiled from commercial and public lists. The magazine has even found its way into the mailbox of the head of Shanghai's Internet security division.
News updates go out daily, and the main edition is released about every 10 days. In most cases, recipients can get themselves off the subscription list with an email.
But the editors don't let people like government officials or police off so easily.
"For instance," said Long, "if an address belonging to the police department requests unsubscription, we generally don't honour it."
The newsletters are sent from a different address every day. Random delivery is an essential part of the strategy, said Feng Donghai, an editor in New York. That way, recipients can deny that they deliberately subscribed.
The Internet has provided access to academic and economic information, helping to speed the country's development. But it also created a common ground for activists across China. A fledgling opposition group, the China Democracy Party, used email to publicise its platform, and its founders credited the Internet with helping the party grow from 12 to 200 declared members in several cities in four months.
As a result, Beijing has created special squads of Internet police to patrol cyberspace. On December 23rd, President Jiang Zemin specifically threatened computer programmers, along with artists and writers, with stiff jail terms if they "endanger state security". Earlier in the same week, China Democracy Party founder Wang Youcai was sentenced to 11 years in prison for subversion. Two of his crimes were emailing exiled Chinese dissidents in the United States and accepting overseas funds to buy a computer.
But so far, security officials have found that it's much easier to control people than to harness the Internet. Just ask Lin Hai.
The 30-year-old Shanghai software entrepreneur has been branded China's first "cyber-dissident." He is charged with providing VIP Reference with 30,000 email addresses, including those of top officials. His trial last month was closed to the public - even his wife was prevented from attending. His lawyers argued that authorities couldn't stop the message, so they arrested the messenger. Lin is awaiting a verdict.
Lin's case has created a community of unlikely allies. Hacker groups such as the Cult of the Dead Cow (www.cultdeadcow.com) have joined the American Association of the Advancement of Science (www.aaas.org), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) and Human Rights in China (www.hriching.org) to pepper official Chinese organisations with email pushing for Lin's acquittal and leniency for Wang Youcai.
"We wanted to use the Internet to defend Lin Hai and Wang Youcai since they are being punished for sending email," said Bobson Wong, executive director of the Digital Freedom Network, one of the action's organisers. "This campaign helps the global Internet community to protect free speech around the world."
Some "hacktivists" outside China have already made their own judgments on the case. When a California computer science student who calls himself "Bronc Buster" read about Lin Hai, he decided to protest. Bronc and his partner "Zyklon" cracked the Chinese network, defaced a government-run web site and say they also dismantled several "firewalls" blocking access to censored sites.
"The `hacking' part took less than two minutes . . . We spent more time laughing than we did `hacking', " Bronc Buster said in an email.
It was their second assault on Chinese government sites. In October, the pair said they had defaced a government-sponsored site on human rights in China. "These sites had some of the poorest security I've ever seen for a system run by a powerful world government," Bronc Buster said.
He said they came across about 20 firewall servers blocking everything from playboy.com to parents.com.
"They monitor everything," he wrote. "The list of blocked sites was so large, I don't know how it could check them all."
The hackers said they instructed five of the servers to ignore the blocks and left a message inviting computer users to explore the Internet freely while they could.
"It would be extremely easy for anyone with the needed resources to totally take down the entire Internet in China," Bronc Buster wrote.
Hacking is a crime in both China and the United States. Bronc Buster emphasised that they simply moved files and didn't destroy any data, which would be a more serious crime. "I guess that's what makes this a case of `hacktivism' rather than a case of `Internet terrorism.'"