Re: [Marxism] Fw: Chinese Govt. Attacks Marxist Internet Archives,

[Saul Thomas <stthomas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's extremely unlikely that the Chinese government or anyone
in the Chinese government would attack the MIA. They do block
a number of leftist websites, including the Chinese Workers
Website (in Chinese: http://www.zggr.org), an editor of which
Stephen Philion interviewed here:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/philion130306.html
But even these leftist websites, many of which have now moved
to servers in other countries, do not suffer denial of service
attacks by the government. In fact, they are still easily
accessible in China by anyone who knows how to use a web proxy
(which a lot of people, though not everyone, knows how to do). 

The MIA site is not blocked in China, and there's no reason
why it should be--most of the stuff on the site is freely
available in Chinese elsewhere on the web or in libraries or
bookstores. And of the stuff that's not easily available, it's
nothing the government is too worried about. This includes the
historical documents by the Chinese Trotskyists on the site,
which only a small handful of Chinese people would be
interested in reading. You could buy Chinese translations of
Mandel's three volume biography of Trotsky and Trotsky's
biography of Stalin, along with the memoir of the famous
Chinese Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin, in Chinese bookstores as of
the late 1990s, and they caused no great sensation. (The
government does, however, block the website of the Hong Kong
Trotskyist group Pioneer, presumably because they write about
contemporary issues).

The Chinese government has directly and indirectly through
words and actions has repudiated a great deal of Marxism, and
it has succeeded in causing a good number of Chinese people to
be miseducated about Marxism, ignorant of it, indifferent to
it and/or hate it. But the government is still nominally
Marxist, and Marx is still officially a good guy, and the
government in fact sponsors Marxist institutes at universities
and relatively free Marxist research. 

It seems to me that most of the people who actually choose to
study Marxism in China are Marxists. I've spoken to quite a
few very freethinking Marxists in Beijing, and though they're
not free to publish everything they want, they do publish work
that's fairly critical of economic and social trends at the
very least since the 1990s. In conversation they're very frank
in their assessments of what's going on. I recently went to a
talk in Beijing on "communism" by a researcher at one of the
state run research institutes. The talk itself was not very
impressive--warmed over developmentalism a la Eduard Berstein.
  After the talk I asked him what he thought was the current
class character of the Chinese Communist Party, and he
immediately answered that it was a "privileged bureaucratic
class". We can argue about that assessment all day long, but
the interesting thing to me was that he wasn't at all afraid
to say it in a crowded room where there were lots of strangers
around him. On the one hand this shows that there are
freethinking Marxists who can exist fairly openly, but the
very fact that they can exist without being harassed means
that the government doesn't see them as much of a threat.

It's possible that there might be some lower level radical
anti-Marxists in the government, but then why would he or she
target a foreign website that has virtually no influence in
China? Why not first try to have the page blocked in China
rather than attempting a more serious attack? Or better yet,
why not go after the many dozens or hundreds of Chinese
leftist targets that have much more influence? There are the
openly Marxist researchers I mentioned, there is the
Z-Net-style site of the leftist Utopia Bookstore
(http://www.wyzxsx.com/Article/index.asp), and you can find
openly left blogs on sites run by the major Chinese blog
service hosts.

I think it's even less likely that the Chinese government or
anyone in the government would or could in official capacity
purposely choose to coordinate the attack between the servers
at the various IP addresses listed in the MIA notice. These
are computers scattered all across China, from "railway
telecom" in Beijing to the Nanjing  Medical University. Why,
if you had any government resources to work with, would you go
through the trouble to do that? Not all web servers in China
are controlled by the state--probably only a very small
minority are. I know some people who run web servers at
universities in China, and they're the same kind of nerdy guys
who run web servers at universities in the United States. How
are you going to get the web nerd at Nanjing Medical
University to participate in an attack on the Marxist Internet
Archive?

I think it's much more likely that the attack on the MIA is
the work of some hacker (possibly in China, but at least just
as likely elsewhere) who has used some virus or trojan and
taken control of a number of "zombie" machines in China from
which he could launch attacks. Or probably more likely the IP
addresses of the attacking machines are just faked, as Pance
suggests. 

I wrote a small bit on internet control in China a few months
ago here:
http://saulinbeijing.blogspot.com/2006/11/internet-control-in-china.html
The situation has changed slightly since I wrote
that--blogspot blogs are no longer blocked in China, but
wikipedia is blocked again. Unfortunately for Louis, wordpress
blogs are also blocked, so he's denied 1.3 billion readers
(except for those who know how to use proxies).


Saul

>
> 1 hour sample of attacking IP origins
>
> 222.35.30.105
>       
> China Railway Telecom, Beijing
>
> 60.16.220.61
>       
> CNC Group, Liaoning Province Network, Liaoning
>
> 121.34.136.245
>       
> China Net, Guangdong Province Network, Guanzhou
>
> 222.240.83.89
>       
> China Net, Changsha Node Network
>
> 122.4.213.41
>       
> China Net, Shandong Province Network, Jinan
>
> 203.192.13.2
>       
> Xinhua News Agency
>
> 221.216.207.194
>       
> CNC Group, Beijing Province Network, Beijing
>
> 221.6.37.60
>       
> Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing Jiangsu Province
Network, Nanjing
>
> 221.226.2.213
>       
> China Net, Jiangsu Province Network, Jiangsu
>
> 61.233.167.159
>       
> China Railway Telecom Center, unknown city

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