Peng Liyuan, the wife of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, right, using what Chinese netizens said was an iPhone in Mexico last week. The photograph went viral on Weibo before being censored.Eduardo Verdugo/Associated PressPeng Liyuan, the wife of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, right, using what Chinese netizens said was an iPhone in Mexico last week. The photograph went viral on Weibo before being censored.
BEIJING — “The west is moving towards China in its quest for mass surveillance,” reads a headline in The Observer, a Sunday publication and the sister newspaper of The Guardian, which has published a string of articles about classified National Security Agency surveillance programs, transfixing readers around the world.
Is America becoming more like China, a country that has long subjected its citizens to surveillance?
The revelations came in a week when President Barack Obama met with Xi Jinping in California — and cybersecurity was a major point of discussion, with the U.S. saying China has been stealing secrets.
“It is striking how the west and China are moving incrementally towards each other, especially in the practice of mass surveillance,” wrote Henry Porter, a journalist and novelist and the London editor of Vanity Fair magazine, in the commentary in The Observer.
“But unlike the Chinese, for the moment at least, we have the option to oppose what’s happening,” he concluded.
On the Chinese mainland, where I have lived and worked for a decade, people regularly speak of their frustrations and fears at being spied on by their government, which employs probably tens of thousands of people as well as sophisticated technology to monitor citizens’ electronic and digital communication. Information gathered in this way has been used to convict people of speech crimes, including political subversion.
Many ordinary Chinese have told me they would like to “cross the Wall,” referring to the so-called Great Firewall of censorship that turns China’s Internet into something like a “Chinternet” — a censored domestic Internet that carries news and reports the state approves of. It also carries reports the state doesn’t approve of, but these usually are deleted quickly.
But some fear using a VPN, or virtual private network, that bypasses the censorship by logging a person on from outside the country; the state knows when you use one and it would identify them as people who want to evade censorship, exposing them to possible harassment, they say.
Now, deepening the irony, Edward Snowden — the man identified as the whistleblower on N.S.A. operations like Prism, a surveillance program with global reach run by U.S. intelligence agencies using data from some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google — is said to be in China, specifically in Hong Kong, lying low in a hotel as the storm over his revelations gathers.
Chatter on China’s Weibo, its virtual “town square,” is slowly gathering (today is a public holiday) — though so far it still seems muted, perhaps a sign of how sensitive this question is.
There was this, posted by Wang Yao, who identified himself as the editor of the Shenzhen News Net: because of the revelations, should Peng Liyuan, the wife of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, stop using an iPhone?
The background: on a recent trip to Mexico, Ms. Peng was pilloried by many Chinese netizens for apparently using an iPhone, a foreign brand that has been criticized by Chinese state media in the past for alleged poor treatment of Chinese customers.
Might that iPhone actually be a national security risk now, Mr. Wang asked?
“China’s First Lady may want to change the phone she uses,” he wrote. “Peng’s photographs, and any information sent via Apple, can all be read by America’s spy agency the NSA. The leaked documents showed that the NSA has gotten hold of an untold number of Google and Apple customers’ records,” he wrote.
Writing on Huxiu.com, a business information and opinion Web site, a person called Liushui fei sha wrote: “I’d heard before that there were some politically persecuted Chinese who sought asylum in America, now it turns out a politically persecuted American has come to a Chinese special administrative zone for asylum. Sometimes you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry over mankind.”
Wrote Maifu lulling ren: “Too brave! Where does that courage come from? In China, people who ‘break big wind’ will be arrested by the government and put in labor camp. Who dares care about politics?”
Someone called ghujki wrote, simply: “Come to China.”
Blogging in The Atlantic, James Fallows seemed to echo Mr. Porter’s point that “we have the option to oppose what’s happening,” when he wrote: “the United States and the world have gained much more, in democratic accountability, than they have lost in any way with the revelation of these various N.S.A. monitoring programs.” He added: “The debate on the limits of the security-state is long overdue, and Edward Snowden has played an important role in hastening its onset.” But he regretted Mr. Snowden had gone to Hong Kong, he wrote, since it is part of China, a country that is less free than the U.S.
Is America becoming more like China in disregarding people’s rights and privacies? Is the Internet in reality crafting a less free world that all our children will have to contend with, not just Chinese children? Can freedoms be protected, and how? Let us know what you think.