The Chinese government declared 1996 the Year of the Internet. There wasn’t much to it: only one person in ten thousand was connected—at a modem speed of 14.4 kilobits per second—and 86 percent of the population had never encountered a computer. Even in universities email was still a novelty, haltingly introduced in 1994. Yet in one respect China was the most advanced nation on the planet. Using equipment supplied by Sun Microsystems and Cisco, the Chinese Public Security Bureau had corralled the entire country, all 3,705,000 square miles, within a fanghuo qiang, or firewall. The firewall promised to make the internet safe for autocracy. All online communication could be monitored, at least in principle, and access to any website could be denied. On February 1, 1996, Premier Li Peng signed State Council Order 195, officially placing the government “in charge of overall planning, national standardization, graded control, and the development of all areas related to the internet,” and expressly forbidding users “to endanger national security or betray state secrets.” Enforcement was arbitrary. Discipline was imposed by the dread of uncertainty. This was an inevitability, since the Public Security Bureau couldn’t possibly watch all online activity within China, let alone block every objectionable web page worldwide. Interviewed by Wired magazine, the computer engineer overseeing the fanghuo qiang bluntly explained his working policy: “You make a problem for us, and we’ll make a law for you.” In many countries such a firewall might have stifled development, but most Chinese weren’t interested in making problems. They were attracted to the internet’s dazzling potential, as advertised on billboards that encouraged them to “join the internet club, meet today’s successful people, experience the spirit of the age, drink deep of the cup of leisure.” Those who could afford a connection, which cost approximately half the monthly salary of a recent college graduate, casually referred to the fanghuo qiang as the wangguan , calmly evoking the many guan (passes) of the Great Wall as natural features of China’s wan wei wang (ten-thousand-dimensional web).
Application Status of Face Recognition Products for Chinese Public Security
