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Internet refugees flee Xinjiang
Xinjiang has no e-mail, no blogs, no instant messaging and
only four restricted Web sites. Some travel more than 1,000km for services most
of us can¡¦t imagine living without
By Cara Anna
AP, LIUYUAN, CHINA
Saturday, Jan 23, 2010, Page 9
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They arrive at this gritty desert crossroads weary from a
13-hour train ride, but determined. The promised land lies just across the
railway station plaza: a large, white sign that says ¡§Easy Connection Internet
Cafe.¡¨
The visitors are Internet refugees from China¡¦s Xinjiang, whose 20 million
people have been without links to the outside world since the government blocked
virtually all online access, text messages and international phone calls after
ethnic riots in July. It¡¦s the largest and longest such blackout in the world,
observers say.
Every weekend, dozens of people pile off the train in Liuyuan, a sandswept town
that¡¦s the first train stop outside Xinjiang, 650km east of Urumqi.
¡§We must get online. We must,¡¨ said Zhao Yan, a petite, ponytailed businesswoman
from Xinjiang¡¦s capital, Urumqi.
She has rented the same private booth in the Internet cafe every weekend since
August in an uphill battle to keep her small trading business going.
¡§If this goes on another couple of months, I¡¦ll have to give up,¡¨ Zhao said. ¡§I
can¡¦t keep up with the outside world, and I¡¦m losing money.¡¨
Xinjiang residents are without Internet links unless they flee to farflung
places like Liuyuan. One customer had traveled 1,200km just to get online.
Authorities unplugged Xinjiang, a sprawling area three times the size of Texas,
in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the ethnic rioting between the Han Chinese
majority and the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that the government says left
almost 200 dead.
China¡¦s government blamed overseas activists for the riots, saying they stirred
up resentment in the Uighur community through Web sites and e-mails.
For many, it feels like being thrown back in time 30 years.
Xinjiang now has no e-mail. No blogs. No instant messaging. The government this
month promised Internet access would resume ¡§gradually,¡¨ but it also said the
same thing in July and not much has changed. So far, only four restricted Web
sites, half of them state-run media, have returned.
No country has shut down an information infrastructure so widely for so long,
said the Open Net Initiative, a Harvard-linked partnership that monitors
Internet restrictions around the world.
Some former Soviet Union countries have done it during sensitive elections, but
¡§the blackout only lasted for hours or days at most,¡¨ said Rafal Rohozinski, the
group¡¦s principal investigator.
The normal Internet in China is already among the world¡¦s most restricted.
¡§The fact that the Chinese authorities had to resort to shutting down and
cutting off the entire infrastructure ... is indicative of the difficulty they
are having in controlling cyberspace,¡¨ Rohozinski said.
¡§You can look at news or movies. That¡¦s it. It¡¦s all one-way,¡¨ said a
23-year-old from Urumqi, who sat a few screens away from Zhao and was clicking
between an e-mail account and a Russian-language Web site.
He¡¦d been online for 11 hours. He didn¡¦t give his name because he¡¦s half Uighur
and was worried about retribution from authorities.
Liuyuan has little more to offer the Xinjiang refugees besides its Internet
connection and its steady supply of cross-country trains.
¡§You don¡¦t want to stay here,¡¨ said the clerk at the Liutie Hotel, the only
guesthouse in town.
Most people who get off the train are headed for the famous oasis of Dunhuang,
two hours to the south.
Last Sunday, most Xinjiang customers bolted back home after hearing word that
mobile phone text-messaging services had finally resumed. The region¡¦s mobile
phone users sent 42.84 million text messages the first day of service alone, the
state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Users are limited to no more than 20 texts per day, with no international
service. International calls from Xinjiang are also blocked. Residents can call
abroad only from a China Telecom office, where they first have to show their ID.
In some places, people wait in line for more than an hour.
¡§It¡¦s like it¡¦s back to the ¡¦70s, when we just had radios and a loudspeaker. We
just heard whatever [the government] said and we had no choice,¡¨ said Niu Jun, a
Hong Kong resident who grew up in Xinjiang.
Since her hometown can¡¦t receive overseas calls, she now must cross the border
to the mainland just to telephone her parents.
One Xinjiang woman who wanted to chat with her US husband finally took an
overnight bus to neighboring Kazakhstan to get online.
¡§It¡¦s like a social experiment ¡X what would happen if we take away the
Internet,¡¨ said the husband, Kevin Komoroski, who lives in Missouri.
He said their work on her US visa application has slowed to a crawl and now
relies on air mail.
¡§No one at any sort of level knows when it will end,¡¨ he said.
An international scientific conference was relocated outside the region. A board
member of an international academic association travels regularly to Beijing,
2,896km from Urumqi, to check her e-mail. The Federal Express office in Urumqi
tells customers to check orders by phone instead.
The Xinjiang government has said foreign investment and tourism were ¡§seriously¡¨
affected last year, though it points to the July violence alone. Import-export
business fell 38.8 percent in the first nine months of last year, dropping
almost 18 percentage points more than the rest of China, it said in a report
this month.
¡§We¡¦re like deaf people now,¡¨ said Wei Chengzhi, who works in Xinjiang Wind
Energy Co¡¦s online service office. ¡§We¡¦re working on a joint project with a
partner company in Shanghai. We can¡¦t communicate with them. Nor can we do any
online research.¡¨
Xinjiang¡¦s commerce department says it now offers Internet access to companies
that can get approval from the local foreign trade or foreign investment office,
but only on weekdays.
One business owner couldn¡¦t wait. Just after the riots, Ma Hui and her husband
took off on a three-day road trip east to Beijing to keep their dried fruit
company going. Since then, her husband has lived in the capital to deal with
online orders, while Ma lives in Urumqi and handles the product.
¡§We¡¦ve been married three years and we¡¦ve never lived apart before,¡¨ she said.
¡§We don¡¦t know when to expect the Internet to come back to normal.¡¨
One person who doesn¡¦t mind the blackout is the owner of Liuyuan¡¦s Easy
Connection Internet Cafe, who wouldn¡¦t give his name, but said he was quite
happy with the increased business.
As night fell in Liuyuan, Zhao sighed and returned to her work online. She had
three more hours before taking the overnight train home to Urumqi, but she
expected to be back and online this morning.
It¡¦s easy to recognize her fellow refugees by their computer bags, Zhao said.
¡§You should go to Jiuquan,¡¨ the next major stop east along the railway, she
said. ¡§It¡¦s a bigger city, and even more people go there. They check into the
hotels and use the broadband.¡¨
A faster connection ¡X another 320km away.
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