In China, GitHub is a free-talk zone for Covid information

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Yi-Ling Liu

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When the coronavirus first spread to China in January, Chinese medical student Weilei Zeng watched the pandemic spread online from his apartment in Riverside, California. Thousands of miles from home, he frantically tried to keep to the news of the crisis, clinging to the rare wave of discontent that flooded Chinese social media: closing diaries written by concerned patients; video footage of crowded hospitals; tributes to Li Wenliang, the young doctor who berated for “rumor” when he first warned the public about the virus (and that he would die of Covid-19 only a month later). So inevitably, when Chinese censors stepped in to blank the internet, Zeng would go back to a link he had visited a few days earlier only to locate the familiar 404 error message, indicating that the page went over.

Zeng soon discovered that those messages had not disappeared. Many had been preserved and quietly hidden in an unforeseen corner of the web: GitHub, the world’s largest open source software site. Founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2016, GitHub is popular with developers and programmers, who use platshape primarily to share and collect code. Zeng used it to collaborate with his educational peers on study projects. But after the outbreak of the pandemic, he encountered thousands of Chinese web users repurposing GitHub as a Covid-19 archive, opposing censors to document the outbreak in the form of newspaper articles, medical journals, and non-public accounts.

A collaborative project, known as a “repository,” was named # 2020nCovMemory. Founded by seven volunteers from around the world, it included everything from investigative reports published through the Chinese news magazine Caixin to journal entries from Wuhan editor Fang Fang, who criticized the government’s suppression of information. local. and its initial failure to alert the public to the virus. Another repository, called Terminus2049, named after a planet from the Isaac Asimov Foundation series, accumulated delicate pieces that were otherwise inaccessible behind the wonderful Chinese firewall, such as an interview with Ai Fen, the doctor who discovered the virus. for the first time in December. In February, Zeng joined a repository called 2020nCov_individual_archives, to collect online magazine entries and citizen accounts of everyday life from the pandemic. “It made me feel so much more at peace, knowing that those stories were stored somewhere,” Zeng said.

On the Chinese Internet, global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are banned, and national platforms like WeChat and Weibo are strictly controlled. But GitHub, known to some Chinese Internet users as the “last land of free speech in China,” remains accessible. The Chinese government cannot censor individual projects because GitHub uses the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts all traffic. But they are also not willing to ban GitHub entirely, as it is invaluable to the Chinese tech industry. The country’s developers rely heavily on the open source community; More than 690,000 Chinese users opened an account in 2017 alone. China is now coming to the United States for the number of open source projects on GitHub. Blocking the site would be too expensive. An attempt to do so in 2013 sparked a public outcry; Tech leaders like Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s former chief operating officer in China, argued that the lockdown “would derail the country’s programmers” and cause a “loss of competitiveness and knowledge. ” A few days later, the blockade was lifted.

All of this has made GitHub one of the few censor sanctuaries and an online platform of resistance. GitHub is used to distribute anti-censorship software like GreatFire. In March 201nine, frustrated technical staff in China created a GitHub repository called ninenine6. ICU to meet their strenuous painting schedules, create a “blacklist” of corporations that illegally forced staff to paint more than 60 hours in accordance with the week and drafted petitions to the government. departments. to demand better operating conditions. (The so-called ninenine6. ICU is based on a joke that ninenine6’s not unusual schedule among Chinese technical personnel (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) will send him to the intensive care unit. ) Organize a GitHub organization and Microsoft staff in the United States have expressed support for the move and asked Microsoft to ensure that the ninenine6. ICU repository remains “uncensored and available to all. “

The platform’s unique resistance can be explained through “the cute cat theory of virtual activism,” says Margaret Roberts, a professor who reads Chinese censorship at UC San Diego. The theory, presented via web philosopher Ethan Zuckerman, states that if an online page combines practical politics with popular and engaging entertainment, let’s say lolcat memes, the online page will be harder to censor because users need it. Cute cat. “But in the case of GitHub,” says Roberts, “the cute cat turns out to be the open source code of the world. “

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For Chinese authorities, GitHub’s continued presence on the country’s web raises a familiar dilemma: On the one hand, dissent online will have to be under control. Yet they are heavily invested in Cute Cat. At the center of it all is the precarious balancing act that the government has taken for more than two decades: can it keep the net loose enough to drive economic growth, but not so loose? how to open the door? to political instability?

But GitHub possibly soon the Chinese would ease that tension. Last December, the company announced its goal of opening a separate subsidiary in China. According to a Financial Times report, Erica Brescia, GitHub’s chief operating officer, said the company, in talks with the Chinese government, is making plans as a “phased approach” to expansion. A separate GitHub subsidiary may also allow the Chinese government to reap the economic benefits of the open source platform and the ability to censor projects it deems unacceptable. “Internal users in China would be an easier target through Chinese political censorship and surveillance,” said Jeffrey Knockel, Internet censorship and surveillance researcher at Citizen Lab.

Although a GitHub spokesperson recently said that they “have no plans to create an entity in China at this time,” Microsoft has made decisions in the past. The company already offers censored versions of Bing, LinkedIn, and other products in China. GitHub did not respond to COO interview requests or follow-up questions related to the December announcement.

Any possible derivation of the product – segregating users into two platforms, a Chinese edition and a US edition, based on nationality – would be “another step towards the fork of the Internet,” says Adam Segal, director of digital and cyberspace policy program. at the Council on Foreign Relations. We have noticed more and more examples of this, since Zoom’s recent resolution to avoid providing direct access to users based in China and Bytedance’s transparent demarcation of its TikTok and Douyin products.

The demanding situations that GitHub faces in engaging with China raise issues that the tech industry has faced since Google pulled out of the country just a decade ago: Should corporations give in to demands from the Chinese government to win a large percentage of the world’s online user base?

“There are many platforms such as Google, Twitter or Facebook that have chosen not to comply with China’s censorship and surveillance needs under the charge of not having access to this market,” says Knockel. “[But] Microsoft has long met China’s surveillance and censorship needs to gain access to the Chinese market. “

If it is about a moral compromise between erasing Chinese Covid-19 publications from the virtual ether in exchange for access to the country’s open source code, between preserving a collective history and advancing technological progress, what resolution does Microsoft mark? What would be gained and what would be lost?

In April, after the lockdown in Wuhan ended and the virus entered China, the # 2020nCovMemory repository disappeared, dismantled through its creators for security reasons, and the original link now generates a 404 error. Page’s team took the decision to suspend operations, due to the “situation” in China, most likely out of concern for its non-public protection and retaliation from the government. In fact, at the end of the month, a Beijing-based Terminus 2049 contributor was arrested by police for “picking up fights and causing disturbances,” according to knowledge given to his family, even though he did not. It is not transparent if your arrest was similar to GitHub. to deposit.

The 2020nCov_individual_archives files remain.

“We are only saving non-public stories. It’s not like we position ourselves as members of the government, ”Zeng said.

Still, Zeng admits, he’s getting nervous. “I guess we’re just betting on the border ball,” he says, a word that’s not unusual in China and means getting as close to the limits of what’s allowed without crossing the line. When the non-public becomes political, does the archive become a history of exchange and preservation becomes an act of resistance? “I guess you never know for sure where that line is,” Zeng said. “You never know when they will come looking for you. “

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