China Reform Monitor: No. 888

[Editor’s Note: Tight controls over telecommunications and protest are not new to China, but amid spreading unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, and online calls for a Chinese Jasmine Revolution, authorities have begun an unprecedented countrywide crackdown on dissent. Security services and censors have averted protests among students at universities in major cities like Beijing and Xian by banning student gatherings while large numbers of public security forces have been dispatched to Quancheng Square in Jinan, Shandong and Chunxi Road in Chengdu, Sichuan. In Beijing, Wangfujing and Xidan are heavily guarded and Hailong Mansion in Zhongguancun has been encircled by an iron fence. The expanding crackdown also applies to a range of telecommunications technology, including widespread monitoring and censorship of cell phones and the internet. This special CRM documents two recent student-led protests and the new methods Beijing has deployed over the last few weeks to suppress dissent.]

March 10:

By 2014, Chongqing, China’s largest metropolitan region will spend $781.6 million to install 200,000 new video surveillance cameras, raising the total to 510,000. A report on the municipal government’s website stated that “310,000 digital eyes are still not enough” to monitor crime and other social ills, adding that Beijing and Shanghai together operate more than three million surveillance cameras. The website reports that over the last three months, leads from surveillance cameras helped local police solve thirty percent of criminal cases, or a total of 8,217. The Beijing government reports that the city plans to spend $845,000 to place video cameras and audio recorders in more than 2,100 movie theaters, karaoke bars, and other entertainment venues. The goal is to “directly and effectively monitor” the content of performances on behalf of various government agencies. China has more than seven million surveillance cameras, with another eight million expected by 2015, the New York Times reports.

March 21:

More than 500 students at Shaanxi Northwestern Polytechnic University walked out of their dorms at 2pm on March 20 to take a silent protest “stroll” on the campus. According to a posting from student leaders reported in the Apple Daily: “For the sake of democracy, freedom, and for justice, the students of Shaanxi Northwestern Polytechnic University have bravely walked out today. Without democracy, the privileged class will monopolize employment. As graduation will be tantamount to unemployment, there is no difference between attending college and being expelled.” When students left their dorms and classes, public security forces were dispatched to the scene and campus authorities used loudspeakers to broadcast repeated calls urging students to return to their dorms or be expelled. The gathering ended without violence and students returned to their dorms, none were detained.

March 22:

China’s government has begun an extensive crackdown on private communications via the telephone, texts and the internet. Telephone calls that mention politically sensitive words such as “protest” are being cut off, for instance, and internet police are disrupting Gmail service in the country. For six months or more, censors have prevented Google searches of the English word “freedom” and the government’s computerized censors have crippled several popular virtual private-networks (VPN) designed to evade the Great Fire Wall. Even the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was blocked for a day for reasons that are unclear. China’s censorship machine has been operating ever more efficiently since mid-2008, and restrictions once viewed as temporary — like bans on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter— are now considered permanent. “The hard-liners have won the field, and now we are seeing exactly how they want to run the place,” Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing analyst of China’s leadership, told the New York Times. “I think the gloves are coming off.”

March 23:

Ming Pao reports that over 1,000 students from Yang-En University, a private college in Quanzhou, Fujian, went on strike for several days last week. The students showed up to support teachers who had gathered at the university’s administrative building to demand back pay and access to their files in the college archives – which university officials had impounded. The students claim that the college administrators expropriated teachers’ salaries, ignored teaching quality, and overcharged tuition fees while failing to improve college facilities and equipment. Students pay 20,000 yuan per year in tuition, yet the college faculty has fallen from 1,000 to 300 forcing many classes to be cancelled or merged and the campus facilities are in disrepair. Substandard dorms and facilities were also among the reasons for the student demonstrations in the spring of 1989.