To her fellow students, Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate, plain of dress, quick with a smile, and perhaps possessed with a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary.
And for Hu, a sophomore at Shanghai Normal University, coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads.
For several hours each week, she repairs to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers, where she logs in unsuspected by other students to help police her school's Internet forums.
Once online, following suggestions from professors or older students, she introduces politically correct or innocuous themes for discussion.
Recently, she says, she started a discussion of what celebrities make the best role models, a topic suggested by a professor as appropriate.
Politics, even school politics, is banned on university bulletin boards like these.
Hu says she and her fellow moderators try to steer what they consider negative conversations in a positive direction with well-placed comments of their own.
Anything they deem offensive, she says, they report to the school's Web master for deletion.
During some heated anti-Japanese demonstrations last year, for example, moderators intervened to cool nationalist passions, encouraging students to mute criticisms of Japan.
Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator -- and all without the knowledge of her fellow students -- Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet.
For years, China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary, and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech.
Volunteer censors
But Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.
Last month, that effort was named "Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow," and it is part of a broader "socialist morality" campaign, known as the Eight Honors and Disgraces, begun by the country's leadership to reinforce social and political control.
Under the Civilized Internet program, service providers and other Internet companies have been asked to purge their servers of offensive content, which ranges from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent.
Chinese authorities say that more than 2 million supposedly "unhealthy" images have already been deleted under this campaign, and more than 600 supposedly "unhealthy" Internet forums shut down.
Critics of the program say the deletions, presented as voluntary acts of corporate civic virtue, are clearly coercive, since no company wants to be singled out as a laggard.
Having started its own ambitious Internet censorship efforts -- a "harmful-information defense system," as the university calls it -- long before the government's latest campaign, Shanghai Normal University is promoting itself within the education establishment as a pioneer.
Although most of its students know nothing of the university's monitoring efforts, Shanghai Normal has conducted seminars for dozens of Chinese universities and education officials on how to tame the Web.
Nevertheless, school officials were not eager to talk about the program. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it there's not much to say about it" said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the school's propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized."
Proud tattler
For her part, Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building a "harmonious society."
"We don't control things, but we really don't want bad or wrong things to appear on the Web sites," she said. "According to our social and educational systems, we should judge what is right and wrong. And as I'm a student cadre, I need to play a pioneer role among other students, to express my opinion, to make stronger my belief in communism."
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver