TORONTO—An invisible war is being fought, and it threatens to spell doom for China’s ruling Communist Party.

The CCP, which has for decades held a tight grip on information in China, is facing new challenges in the medium of the Internet, where a network of computer-savvy activists—or “hacktivists”—are pushing forward the boundaries of free expression.

To counter the challenges of free information flow, the CCP is implementing a comprehensive, billion-dollar “Golden Shield” program to place barriers between Chinese people and the Internet.

Speaking before a U.S. government commission on China’s economy and security, Internet censorship expert John Palfrey said China is employing “by far the most intricate filtering regime in the world.”

Palfrey, who directs the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, is part of a team of researchers from Harvard, Cambridge, and the University of Toronto studying Internet censorship around the world.

Palfrey’s team relied on volunteers inside China who agreed to use their home computers to test Internet censorship. The team also used proxies in China to simulate Chinese Internet access from outside the country. They catalogued how actively the Chinese government is blocking certain politically sensitive content in the Mainland.

“Nine Commentaries” Tops the List

Topping the list of blocked content were websites referencing the “Nine Commentaries,” an Epoch Times editorial series that details the untold, brutal history of the CCP. The Commentaries have sparked a wave of resignations from the Communist Party that has upset communist leaders.

The research team found that 90% of websites referencing the key words “Nine Commentaries” have been blocked inside China.

“I would say it definitely means that they want to block that content,” said Nart Villeneuve, the University of Toronto researcher that led the tests.

However, that doesn’t mean they are succeeding, says Bill Xia, CEO of Dynamic Internet Technology, Inc.

Xia’s U.S.-based company provides a number of solutions for e-mail and Internet that allow Chinese to break past China’s censorship wall. His company sends millions of e-mails past China’s filters every day for the U.S. government-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

It also offers a service with hundreds of thousands of regular users inside China called DynaWeb. Chinese Internet users that visit DynaWeb URLs have a window punched through China’s Internet censorship. He estimates that close to half of the over 1.3 million resignations from the CCP logged on the epochtimes.com website have been from users on a DynaWeb URL.

Villeneuve, who is developing his own software to break through the Internet blockade, agrees that the technology exists to get past the censorship. He believes the number of Chinese that take the risk of using this technology is limited because the heavy punishment for banned Internet activity has created a “climate” of “self-censorship.”

Xia says that this tide is turning.

Criticizing The Party Through Technology

“During the Cultural Revolution the Communist Party had a lot of power,” says Xia. “When the party said something, everyone agreed and they followed. If you said one thing wrong about Mao Zedong—even if it was an accident and you actually meant something else—your life would take an immediate turn for the worse. It’s not like that anymore. Everyone is criticizing the party privately.”

Xia says that with hundreds of thousands of breaking through the Internet blockages, the government can’t control all of them. “Now they mostly go after the ones that post the content.”

Xia believes that as more Chinese gain the technical skills to use tools like DynaWeb, a critical mass will form in which the Communist Party can’t maintain a monopoly on information anymore.

Xia estimates that millions in China have already been able to read the Nine Commentaries and says that many volunteers have been using DynaWeb technology to send web links where Chinese can read the Nine Commentaries.

Xia said Chinese have also downloaded audio and video files, apparently for mass-producing Nine Commentaries VCDs and audio CDs inside China. Many other approaches have been used, including e-mail and even mailing of booklets into China.

The Epoch Times Hong Kong office distributed close to a million copies of the Nine Commentaries, some which may have made their way across the border into nearby Shenzhen, China. Even if the booklets aren’t making it across the border, their contents are.

Word of Mouth

According to Terri Chen, a thirty-year-old financial analyst originally from Shenzhen now residing in Washington DC, she was eager to tell her family about the Nine Commentaries.

“I am the only person who is not a Party member,” Chen said. “So naturally I wanted my family to learn about this.”

“Upon calling my mother I was really surprised, she’d already heard about it.”

Chen offered to e-mail her mother a copy. Chen said her mother declined, saying she would get a copy of the commentaries from Hong Kong.

“I think she was a bit afraid,” Chen said.

Chen emailed the commentaries to her mother anyway, and after several subsequent phone calls helped her mother to resign from the party.

Chen found that, in one way or another, the news about the Commentaries had spread widely.

“It was quite surprising” said Chen, “all her colleagues had heard about it, they even knew of the overseas resignation of one of China’s most famous opera singers.”

With additional reporting by R. Galluccio