Report on Internet Circumvention Technologies and Renunciations from the Chinese Communist Party

Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT)
June 2005

Contents

Introduction ____________________________ 1
From The Nine Commentaries to Renunciations from the CCP______________ 2
Access to the Nine Commentaries ____________________________ 3
The Renunciations from the CCP ____________________________ 5
Demographics ____________________________ 5
Model for the future ____________________________10
User access to the Nine Commentaries through Dynaweb__________________11
Media format files ____________________________19
Conclusion ____________________________20

Introduction

Dynamic Internet Technologies is a company established with the mission of bringing Internet freedom to people inside China, as the need for uncensored news in the Chinese media continues to grow. With our unique and unparalleled cutting edge technology, we enable Internet users from inside China to break through the national Internet censorship to visit any public website in the free world, regardless if they are blocked or not. So far we have served up to 40 million visitors from inside China over the last three years, which made our web portal well known among Chinese.

This report summarizes a noteworthy phenomenon in users of Internet circumvention technologies in China: renouncing the Chinese Communist Party. Ever since the Epoch Times published the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.(http://www.theepochtimes.com/jiuping.asp)and launched the "Renouncing the Chinese Communist Party" web site (http://tuidang.dajiyuan.com/) to address the demand of Mainland Chinese quitting the Party, over 2 million people have renounced the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as of June 2005.

From The Nine Commentaries to Renunciations from the CCP

The graph below shows the distribution model used to distribute the Nine Commentaries and the wave of renunciations from the CCP that it triggers.

Table 1

Distribution Model

The Nine Commentaries can be accessed through Internet circumvention technologies such as DynaWeb and UltraReach, or be distributed through email or regular mail. Instant messaging, faxing, and phone calling can be used to refer people to read the nine commentaries through various tools, such as the ones mentioned above.

After reading the nine commentaries, Chinese share the information or the full articles with more people. Depending on the reader's situation, they may either directly post a renunciation statement, or may ask help from more experienced Internet users, or may just wait and decide later whether they will post a statement or no. Overall, any extra steps or procedures will create a longer time delay between reading the commentaries and posting a renunciation statement.

Access to the Nine Commentaries

The Nine Commentaries were first published on November 19, 2004 on The Epoch Times website: http://www.epochtimes.com/ , and have later been translated into English and published on the sister English website: www.theepochtimes.com. This editorial analyzes and critiques the Communist Party, its nature and crimes committed in its history in a more detailed and explicit way that has ever been done before.

Soon after the release of this editorial, a large impact started to be felt in China, and many have started to attempt to renounce their membership to the CCP in a public way. Since The Epoch Times website (along with many others) is blocked in China, many have used predominantly the services of Dynamic Internet Technologies and UltraReach Internet, the world leaders in anti-censorship technology.

Since the Epoch Times website is blocked in China, many Chinese have used the services of DynaWeb to access the web site to read the "Nine Commentaries". Our records show that between November 19, 2004 and the end of April 2005, the first of the "Nine Commentaries" received 71,000 page views. Page views for all nine commentaries combined on the DIT website add up to 307,202 as of May 31, 2005. Please refer to the table below for details. The output results from the webalizer tracking tool are also viewable directly on the DIT website at: http://www.dit-inc.us/work/9phtml.

Table 2

Cumulative Page Views

Through our email technology, between December 15, 2004 to February, 2005, Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. sent out the Nine Commentaries to 2.3 million email users in China. According to previous calibration of email delivery, around 5-10% recipients actually open such mass mailing emails. Since 3 emails were send to each account, we estimate at least 5% * 3 * 2.3 million = 345,000 people were able to look at least at one of the Nine Commentaries.

Assuming UltraReach Internet has a similar amount of page views for the Nine Commentaries compared to DynaWeb, the total number of people who read at least one article of the nine commentaries will be at least 71,000 + 71,000 + 345,000 = 487,000.

Table 3

Number of People who read at least one of the Nine Commentaries between November 2004 to April 2005

EmailDynaWebUltraReach*Total
345,00071,00071,000487,000

* = Estimate used for UltraReach Internet

As reference point for page view comparisons, the "Sun Zhigang case" was a famous story on Internet. It was about an innocent young man who died in police custody for walking on the street without an ID. This story was first reported on the most used Chinese Internet portal, Sina news, and received about 1 million page views. A widespread online discussion followed the release of the report until the central government made a promise to improve some related procedures.

Renunciations from the CCP

Table 4

Number of CCP Membership Renunciations

Number of CCP Membership Renunciations

DecemberJanuaryFebruaryMarchApril
Number of People Renouncing2,5464,62070,133501,708598,367*
Number of Renunciation Statements2,5413,72529,156107,160112,444*
Average Number of People per Statement Submission1.001.242.414.685.32
Cumulative Number of People2,5467,16677,299579,0071,177,374
Number of Renunciations through DynaWeb21,75565,35455,261
Percentage of Renunciations through DynaWeb74.61% 60.98%49.14%

The combination of the Internet and our anti-censorship technologies plays a vital role in allowing individuals to resign publicly from the Chinese Communist Party. (To be most precise, the renunciations include "CCP and related organizations" There are also many renunciations from the "Young Pioneers"and "the Communist Youth League" members.) Through the end of April, over 255,000 renunciations of the CCP were published, which represented 1.1 million people (one announcement may represent more than one person). Most of these renunciations have been posted through either Dyna Web or UltraReach Internet.

During the month April 2005 alone, 112,000 renunciations were recorded and published on http://tuidang.dajiyuan.com/ - where the latest live numbers of renunciations can be accessed. DynaWeb accounts for approximately 55,000 of those renunciations - or about 50%.

Demographics: Number of renunciations from specific provinces in China

Table 4 below shows the distribution of the areas where the renunciations are coming from by provinces in China. People from 29 provinces or directly governed cities submitted renunciation statements online via DynaWeb. People from Beijing are especially active: while only comprising 4.3% of the total Internet users in China, renunciation requests from Beijing composed 15% of the total. Shanghai has only 1.6%. These demographic data conform to the view that Beijing residents are more politically savvy with many having experienced the June 4th massacre, while Shanghai residents are more economically oriented.

Even though it is growing fast, Internet users still encompass a small percentage of the overall population in China. Even in Beijing and Shanghai, only one quarter of the people are Internet users. It will take the "ripple effect" more time to reach non-Internet users on a larger scale. For non-Internet users, they will need help from Internet users to publish announcements to resign from the CCP, which will cause further delay in the increase of renunciation from CCP, what we call the "latency effect" These effects may explain some characteristics noticed in the available statistics:

1. The average number of people per renunciation announcement increase from 5.3 to 7.8 during between April and May 2005. We can guess that an increasing number of people are asking someone else to publish the announcement for them.

2. Less visits to the Nine Commentaries are expected in May than April. But the number of people to renounce the CCP is expected to increase from 600K in April to 750K in May. This shows an increasing number of people renouncing the CCP not from directly reading the Nine Commentaries on the Internet.

Table 5

Demographics of Renunciations

See below for more detail on the demographics of the renunciations, including locations outside of China:

http://www.dit-inc.us/dynaweb.php
http://www.dit-inc.us/work/quitccp.html

The information below is based on access data from:
http://tuidang.dajiyuan.com/formsubmit.php . Many users from China use additional overseas proxies to access DynaWeb, and these proxies are logged in our servers - see below. The pie chart in Table 4 shows the distribution based on those IP whose province can be identified. For example, although Beijing compose of 8.8% of total IP in April, it composes 15% of those IP whose province can be identified.

Table 6

Demographics of Renunciations Table

Model for the future

Let's assume the distribution speed for the Nine Commentaries = (some coefficient) * promotion through email/messenger/mail/fax/phone + (some coefficient) * (number of people who already read it) / (fear to share the information and self censorship). We will call this the 1st formula.

Then, let's assume the frequency of renunciations from CCP = (some coefficient) * (distribution speed of the Nine Commentaries) + (some coefficient) * (accumulated readership of the Nine Commentaries) / (decrease hope for the CCP). We will call this the 2nd formula.

We list the distribution process and renunciation process in a few stages:

1. The promotion of the Nine Commentaries reaches the first batch of readers. At this stage, both processes proceed linearly. But eventually, the promotional effect will saturate and will not reach more people. Depending on when the next stage starts, this saturation may or may not show up as decreasing the speed.
2. The ripple effect will dominate when readers will promote the articles themselves, which is reflected by the second term in the 1st formula. This will result in an increasing speed with an exponential growth pattern. Due to the technical difficulty for non Internet users to publish their renunciation (the latency effect), the renunciation process will enter this stage later than the distribution process. This is the current growth pattern.
3. As more people read the Nine Commentaries, they see more people resign from the CCP and while the CCP disappoints people further in its desperation, the fear and self censorship people will decrease, and the hope for CCP to improve will decrease. All those factors will make both processes grow faster taking the shape of an exponential curve.

There are also factors such as non-Internet users represent a lower social class and least privileged people in China who have likely suffered more from the current regime of the CCP. The spreading of the Nine Commentaries from Internet users to non Internet users will therefore bring a stronger motivation to renounce and resign the CCP.

User Access to the Nine Commentaries through Dyna Web

The table below shows the user access to the Nine Commentaries through DynaWeb. We analyzed DynaWeb's log files and extracted visits to Epochtimes.com's Nine Commentaries'URL. As a result of multiple domain names of Epochtimes and mirror sites such as mirror.epochtimes.com, www.epochtimes.com http://www.epochtimes.com or www.dajiyuan.com http://www.dajiyuan.com , and also due to the complexity of DynaWeb, there are many variations of the same link. Since the Nine Commentaries are also published on many other different websites, we didn't include visits to those links. The data here is a low estimate. We only include the html pages, so in this case the number of hits is identical to the number of page views. See also on line: http://www.dit-inc.us/work/9phtml/

Table 7

Frequency of visits to read the Nine Commentaries

Table 8

Detailed statistics of the visits to read the Nine Commentaries

 

Media format files

On websites like http://www.xinshijue.org/ , the Nine Commentaries are accessible in various media formats and specifically designed to make VCDs. Visitors are encouraged to download those files and make VCDs which can then be distributed to others in mass quantities. Among those files, http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9p.iso received around half million hits until April 2005. Please refer to Table 9 below, or view the results on-line: http://www.dit-inc.us/work/9pmedia.html

Table 9

Summary of media files the Nine Commentaries have been downloaded in

April: URL Hits
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9p.iso194,438
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9P-miniCD.zip79,921
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/rm/9ping_9.rm22,918
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/1p/9p-1.mpg.00120,055
Total31,7332

March: URL Hits
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9p.iso122,667
http://media.soundofhope.org/2004/12/17/jiuping_5_128k.mp341,382
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9P-miniCD.zip33,962
http://fgmtv.org/videos18/9ping/dvd/documentary/9ping_4/mpeg2_NTSC/ 9ping_4_mpeg2. mpg.00121,750
Total219,761

February: URL Hits
http://fgmtv.org/videos18/9ping/mp3/9ping.mp3.00245,241
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9p.iso44,463
http://media.soundofhope.org/2004/12/14/jiuping_2_128k.mp327,110
Total116,814

January: URL Hits
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9p.iso133,387
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/ntd/9p4.asf23,243
http://media.soundofhope.org/2004/12/17/jiuping_5_128k.mp321,095
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9P-miniCD.zip17,607
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/rm/9ping_2.rm15,070
Total210,402

December: URL Hits
http://xinshijue.org/cd/down/9ping/9p.iso25,643
http://media.soundofhope.org/2004/12/9/9ping9.mp322,627
Total48,270

Conclusion

DIT is proud to be able to provide Chinese citizens uncensored information about their own country, and especially with the Nine Commentaries.

Looking forward, the Internet distribution of the Nine Commentaries will continue with anti-censorship/circumvention tools being the dominant way to post statements of renouncing CCP membership. We predict that the ripple effect will play a more important role in sustaining the accelerated speed of announcing renunciations of the CCP. The ripple effect itself can result in an exponential increase of renunciations from the CCP. As the ripple effect reaches more people, it will alleviate current obstacles such as lack of interest and fear, making the effect, in turn, even stronger.

Please contact us with any questions, suggestions or inquiries.

For more information on Dynamic Internet Technology, please visit our website:
http://www.dit-inc.us/
or contact us at:
contact@dit-inc.us or 888-384-5505