[Videotape]

Stan Grant (CNN Beijing correspondent): Kang Langyi is a bundle of contradictions. He enjoys what he calls the freedoms of the information age, in a land where ideas are often censored. He munches on that most American of foods, McDonald's, while running a website denouncing the United States and its allies

Kang Langyi (Chinese blogger): More and more young Chinese are using the Internet. The Internet is a convenient and free space.

Stan Grant : He uses this free space to allow people to run messages like this: “Some anti-China wolves have put on sheep's clothing and infiltrated the flock. Expose those Net spies. Execute them on the spot.” People like Kang Langyi helped organise anti-Japanese protests over the Internet earlier this year. The violent demonstrations, some say, were secretly encouraged by the Chinese government.

There has been an information explosion in China - nearly 100 million Internet users and another 300 million people using mobile phones and text messaging. Put simply, the genie is out of the bottle. The challenge for the government here now is to find new ways to put it back in. The government already has Internet police monitoring websites. It's now cracking down on on-line news services, tightening restrictions on sites containing pornography, gambling or violence. It outlaws information inciting demonstrations, concerned that protests against Japan one moment, could turn on China the next. He Jiazheng runs on-line news service Peoples.net. He keeps a tight rein on what is reported.

He Jiazheng (Peoples.net): We emphasise the rule of law. Basically, we advocate discussions within the framework of the law and discourage rumours, abuse and vulgar, offensive stuff.

Stan Grant : “Vulgar, offensive stuff” - like democracy or human rights. These words are currently banned from blog sites and bulletin boards. Here we type in “only democracy can save China,” refresh the page, and it is gone. In China, government censorship clearly casts a long shadow.

***

Jim Clancy: We should note that while we tried to get an official response from the Chinese government, tried to get them to participate in this discussion to explain some of what's going on, we didn't get an answer. We didn't get anyone consenting to come in and talk with us. But we've still got a view from Beijing, and I want to bring in Huang Hung.

Huang Hung: I'm so glad that I'm here, live on television, because “vulgar and offensive stuff” - and then you edited that so that that means “democracy and human rights” - that's a great editing job! This is the kind of thing that for us, working in the Chinese media, honestly does not help to promote the opening up of the Chinese media. The Chinese government traditionally is scared of anything they don't understand, and scared of this kind of interpretation of what they say. So who is going to get it after that are the people who are on the Internet and so on.

In the meantime, it's impossible to control the Internet. You can have a very passive way of erasing things, but chat rooms are all over the place. You can get into any discussion. Between democracy and pornography - you have it, it's all there. You can download pictures, participate in chat rooms, and it's a very passive type of control that they're trying to exercise. And I don't even think that they're that successful.

Jim Clancy: Jaime, is it possible to go on the Internet, get into a chat room and be passing around news stories that don't appear?

Jaime FlorCruz: The Chinese have become more sophisticated in using the Internet to get around the firewalls. The Chinese government is also getting sophisticated in getting the most advanced software to set up the great firewall of China. But because the Internet is the Internet, there's always a way of getting around it, and I think the Chinese have not been as successful as they seem in blocking all the websites. They have also been even less successful when it comes to SMS [text messaging], and I think that's where the real wall is going to fall - with 300 million users. SMS is a huge tool now in China, and a lot of information is passed all around China that way - and marches are organised through SMS. That's very scary for the rulers in Beijing.

Jim Clancy: Vincent Brossel, Reporters Without Borders has a site that tells people how they can anonymously post messages, blog, be on the Internet and not be traced. Let me ask the naïve question: Is that site blocked in China?

Vincent Brossel: Yes, our site is blocked in China, obviously. What we're trying to do with this blogger guide is to promote the fact that you can blog and surf anonymously, and you can try to break down the firewall. The problem with the Internet in China is that now China is the leading country in terms of surveillance of the Internet, with 30,000 cyber police throughout the country. And the main problem is that they have built up this system thanks to U.S. companies - Cisco Systems, Google, Yahoo! - all these companies have been involved in building this big system of surveillance and censorship. Cisco Systems has built the most modern routers, and they've made a lot of money in China, without any ethical principles. It's more than a mistake - it's a shame, what they did.

Now Yahoo! in America is using the First Amendment to defend the fact that there is some Nazi stuff on their website. In China, they were the first to sign a self-censorship commitment, and they are self-censoring everything. Microsoft is censoring their blog tools, which means that if you're a blogger in China and want to type “democracy,” you cannot put “democracy” in your blog.

How is it that U.S. and European companies have been involved in building up the biggest system of control and surveillance of the Internet? It's really a shame. I hope that at least the media companies will not lose their souls in China, and censor what they are saying and writing. The BBC website is blocked, CNN is censored when they cover things like Tiananmen Square.

Jim Clancy: Wen Guang Shao, do you have the sense that Western companies would turn Chinese bloggers in because they see the lure of profits? Is there a sense among Chinese that there's a lot of co-operation between Western companies on the Internet and the Chinese authorities?

Wen Guang Shao: I'm not quite clear about the whole picture there. But I think Western corporations work very closely with Chinese suppliers of equipment, like Huawei. They supply a lot of routers as well, and those use Cisco equipment and systems. It's a matter of commerce and interests for them to do that.

Jim Clancy: I think young people [in China] have the sense that the Internet is going to be their brave new world, that this is where they can have their voice heard. But read the rules: The new rules are that you have to have five editors, with three years' experience each; you have to have $1.2 million in capital in order to open up a website. The government seems to be putting up some rather stiff rules for people to open websites.

Peter Herford: It's also true the government has said you cannot now get onto the Web without registering with your real name and your real address, where you used to be able to do it anonymously. These rules are all well and good, but it takes very few seconds to get around them by anybody who knows how to use the Internet. And if anybody does, it's the younger generation.

Jim Clancy: But that's not having their own sites, like a news site, where people can come - that's participating on some other site. And the government is still going to be in charge of those. Clearly the government sees that Western companies - Microsoft, Cisco - see profits there. And they have something to lose, and something to gain by co-operating. Should the West be considering that if people are going to be limited in that way, then China should be limited in selling its goods on the Internet? One of the reasons they want to get out on the Internet is to market all the different companies they have, to sell things directly to the consumer. Should they be allowed to benefit, when they restrict that same access on the political front?

David Schlesinger: Let's just take half a step backwards. The same technology that can be used to block words that we as journalists find horrible to block, like “democracy” or “freedom,” is exactly the same technology that a library in the United States uses to block something that perhaps the religious right doesn't like, perhaps pornography. So this is not technology for China, for China's own evil purpose. Once you start having blocks anywhere, then it becomes a matter of degree, a matter of the individual place's own morality what you block. We in this room, of course, support freedom of the press - but does that extend to allowing public libraries in the United States to allow free access to every site as well? You have to be a bit careful about painting China too far into one corner.

Jaime FlorCruz: The same technology that can be used to shut down freedom of expression in China is the same technology that is liberating and informing a lot of Chinese. So there is no clear-cut way of determining whether it's bad or it's good, black or white, for foreign companies. Time-Warner, with AOL, was involved in a deal in 1999 with Lenovo, and Time-Warner backed out of it precisely because we were being forced into a deal that would have required us to block certain websites. It's up to the respective companies to make that decision. I still feel that technology is something neutral, that it can be used by either side, or by all sides, and it has both positive and negative roles in our society.

Jim Clancy: Wen Guang Shao, does Phoenix News have a website in China? And is there any difference between the way that it disseminates news and what you have on television, or are they identical?

Wen Guang Shao: They're not identical, but we run a lot of print stories on our website. We don't feel threatened by the government. We haven't had any instance of being blocked by the government, and we have a million visitors per week, maybe more. It's a very popular website and a major source of information for a lot of people in China.

Peter Herford: Particularly the younger generation, they're on you all the time. That's what I hear from my students - they'll automatically quote you guys.

Wen Guang Shao: We also have a chat room that is very active, very much alive, with people putting up outrageous messages sometimes.

Jim Clancy: Huang Hung, what advice do you have for people that are thinking about doing business in China? You've heard the concerns that have been expressed here. What do you tell people?

Huang Hung: I think the one thing that you have to do is experience China for yourself. There is so much second- and third-hand information, and it is very difficult to get a feeling for China and whether you are actually the right company to operate in China. I really suggest you skip all the consultants and advisers. You have to find your own bearings in such a huge market.

Jim Clancy: Let's talk about the international media and what role it has to play in China. How many people here that are working with the media think there's a lot of money to be made in the media in China, a country with 1.3 billion people. Raise your hands. [Many hands raised.] A lot of us think that. How many have actually made any money in China? [A few hands raised.] We've got several here who have made some money, and we'll hear more from them. Let's talk about how the international media push the envelope. Let's watch an excerpt from a CNN story, and then a BBC report.

***

[CNN videotape]

This is the city of Yunyang - more than 150,000 people relocated into new houses, a bright new city built from the ground up. But there is another Yunyang - the original city, where a way of life is being torn down. To get there, we take an early morning cab ride, slipping under the guard of our government minders. Our taxi driver repeats a familiar tale - poor people paying out of their own pockets to move. “Yes, we had to pay a lot. We only got several thousand to move, but we need to pay about 10 times that for a new house,” she says.

I don't want to get out of the car and speak to the camera in public for fear that local government officials will spot me and perhaps confiscate our material. In fact, they didn't want us here at all. We were told by the officials that this city had been completely submerged, that it was no longer here. We came here and discovered that, indeed, much of it is still standing. There are people living here. Many of them don't want to move. In fact, many of them can't afford to move, and simply don't know what their future holds.

[BBC videotape]

Richard Wingfield-Hayes : This is a story that China doesn't want told. I'm about to enter a village in Shandong province. I'm having to sneak into the village after dark because the local authorities here don't want anybody, least of all a foreign journalist, going into this village, because of the terrible things that are recently reported to have happened here.

On another night six months ago, a team of Communist officials arrived in this village. They were searching for women who had broken China's strict one child per family rule. At great risk to themselves, these women have agreed to tell us what happened.

Zhu Hongying was eight months pregnant with her second child. “Someone in the village reported on me. They banged on the door, but I got away. I ran to the field and hid in a ditch.”

Unable to get hold of Zhu, the officials next went to her sister's house. “They started to shout abuse at me. ‘Where is your sister?' they screamed. Then they began to hit me. One hit me in the face, and split my lip. Then he grabbed my hair and pulled out a big chunk.”

They dragged Jinling to the village office. For two days, they kept up the beatings, until her pregnant sister gave herself up. “They took me to the clinic and injected something into my stomach. It was painful. I felt like I was dying. For two days, I was in agony. When the baby came out, it was dead.”

Liu Yanling was also eight months pregnant when they came for her. “After they injected me, the pain was terrible. It went on all day. I felt so miserable, I couldn't stand it.”

Her husband watched as Liu gave birth to a dead boy. “The baby was big,” he says, “nearly three kilos. It had a thick head of hair. When it came out, they put it in a bucket of water to make sure it was dead. Then they threw the body in a bin.”

Across southern Shandong province, more than 7,000 women are thought to have been caught up in this brutal campaign. Go to any village in China, and large red characters spell out Beijing's hard line. The message of the slogans is simple: If you have more than one child, expect trouble. Out here in China's villages, government policy is still implemented through the use of mass political campaigns. You can see it in the large propaganda slogans daubed on the walls all around me here. But it also depends on fear and intimidation. And when local officials in villages such as this are under tremendous pressure from above to get results, all too often it can also end up in the gross abuse of individual human rights.

Once again, a poor corner of rural China has shown the disturbing truth of what can happen in a one-party state when local officials remain above the law. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, BBC News, in Shandong province, China.