Lawmaker aims to stop China's Net censorship

One of the most aggressive human rights activists in Congress has found a new cause: stamping out Internet censorship in China.

Representative Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican and chairman of a House subcommittee on human rights, plans to hold hearings next month on reports that US Internet companies, including Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., aid efforts by the government of China to suppress free speech. The issue has simmered for years as American companies have raced to enter the Chinese Internet market, already the second-largest on earth and rapidly growing.

US businesses and politicians have long said the growth of Internet use in China would lead to greater freedom of expression; in turn, this would encourage the world's most populous nation to begin a gradual transition toward democracy.

Instead, the government has repeatedly censored political speech on the Internet in China. And to the dismay of Smith and other human rights activists, American companies have often acquiesced to this censorship. Last month, for example, Microsoft Corp. shut down a popular Chinese blog run by a researcher for the Beijing bureau of The New York Times.

The shutdown was denounced by human rights groups around the world. The international organization Reporters Without Borders last week urged American Internet companies to establish a voluntary code of conduct that would promote resistance to censorship demands from authoritarian governments. If that doesn't work, the organization said, Congress should pass a law to make such anticensorship policies mandatory.

Smith said such a law is probably the only way to stop US firms from cooperating with overseas censorship. He said that no US company should ever comply with China's political censorship policies, even if it means they lose the right to do business in China.

''Call them on their bluff," Smith said. ''We want an amelioration of your behavior, or we will not do business with you."

Elected in 1980, Smith has become known in Washington for his fervent opposition to human rights abuses. He drafted legislation in 1998 to provide federal funding to help refugees who had been tortured in their native lands. On Tuesday, he was present as President Bush signed a law against human trafficking that Smith wrote and championed, with support from media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

If Smith makes Internet censorship his next crusade, he won't be alone. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus also plans February hearings on the matter.

''We're going to get moving on this," said a caucus member, Democratic Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio. ''There are a lot of people in Congress who are very, very concerned."

Ryan stopped short of calling for legislation. But he noted that the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a research body created by Congress, recently called for legislation requiring American Internet firms to demand a court order from Chinese authorities before revealing information about a user. The law would also require US Internet companies to report such information requests to the US government.

China has about 120 million Internet users, second only to the United States, which has 198 million. But the US Internet market is nearly saturated, while fewer than one-tenth of China's 1.3 billion people are online. This huge untapped market has attracted America's leading providers of Internet hardware, software, and services.

Chinese law, though, bans ''material that harms the prosperity and interests of the state" and ''material that spreads rumors, disturbs social order, or undermines social stability."

Saying that they must comply with the laws of the countries in which they do business, US firms such as Yahoo have blocked Chinese users from doing Internet searches for information deemed subversive by Chinese authorities. In 2004, Google Inc.'s Internet news service in China dropped a number of news sources opposed by the Chinese government, including the Voice of America website.

Last year, Yahoo handed over personal e-mails of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Shi had used his Yahoo account to send foreigners a copy of a Chinese government memo warning of possible trouble during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The government declared the memo was top-secret and sentenced Shi to 10 years in prison.

Microsoft came under fire last year for censoring Chinese Internet communications, even without a specific request from the Chinese government. Former CNN Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon, currently a research fellow for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, demonstrated last summer that the Chinese version of Microsoft's MSN Spaces, a blogging service, automatically censors such words as ''democracy" and ''human rights" from blog postings.

Then came the news that MSN Spaces had shut down the blog of New York Times researcher Zhao Jing, who blogs under the name Michael Anti. Zhao had written about a strike at a Beijing newspaper known for frequently criticizing the government.

Microsoft officials said they were forced to take down Zhao's blog.

''Officials of the Chinese government notified the MSN joint venture in China . . . that they had determined this blog had violated their local laws and requested its removal," said a statement issued by the company. ''Based on this explicit government notification, MSN blocked the MSN Space in order to comply with local laws."

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.