When U.S. President Bill Clinton toured Shanghai last June, he stopped by an Internet cafe to mingle with young people surfing the Web. It was no random photo-op: Clinton was giving a thumbs-up to the liberating role of the Internet. Little did he realize that, not very far from the cafe, a local computer engineer was languishing in jail for tapping the power of the Net.

Shanghai police in March arrested Lin Hai, 30, manager of a local software firm, and charged him with "inciting to overthrow the government." Now awaiting trial, Lin is the first Internet-related political prisoner in China. His offense: passing 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses on to Da Can Kao (Big Reference), an overseas dissident webzine, which then "spammed" the addresses with forbidden information. Shanghai authorities claim the tide of e-mail paralyzed the city's computer network.

Since China four years ago plugged into the yingtewang, as the Internet is known, communist apparatchiks have gingerly widened access to the Net, even as they built firewalls to block sites considered subversive (CNN, TIME) or degenerate (Playboy, Penthouse Live). Today, 1.2 million Chinese have access to the Net, a number that is projected to grow to 5 million by 2000. Typically, the Net-surfers are young, highly educated, influential and affluent.

Just the sort of person who might be inclined to question authority or become involved in dissident activities, which China has long sought to curb. Indeed, it has been the government's continuing crackdown on subversive tendencies that has spawned a new band of "hacktivists"--activists who are shifting to the relatively unpatrolled world of cyberspace to campaign on behalf of democracy. Says Eddie Leung, editor of the Hong Kong Voice of Democracy website, (www.democracy.org.hk), which monitors freedom in China and the former British colony: "There is a significant trend toward using the Internet as a means of bypassing government censorship on the mainland."

Last week, only two days after a state-run organization launched a human rights Web page (www.humanrights-china.org) to promote the official line, a U.S.-based group calling itself Legions of the Underground cracked the site's security and replaced the page with a new one labeled "Boycott China!" The hackers also added links to two sites--Amnesty International and Human Rights in China--usually blocked by state firewalls.

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