The Technograph

For people, like us, who live in the U.S., it is easy to take the freedom of communication and access to information for granted. But can you imagine living somewhere where Facebook, Twitter or Youtube are not as readily available as they are to us? In China, the complex censorship rules have elevated from traditional print and broadcast media to the more recent internet, which had previously provided a platform for the Chinese people to speak up, communicate with each other, and access information like they never had before. The Chinese government no longer held an information monopoly over their people. To counter this situation, the Great Firewall of China (an interesting derivation from the Great Wall of China – the infamous historical fortification built to protect China from foreign invasion) exists and is now the most sophisticated cyberspace monitoring in the world.

What used to be the responsibility of the Central Propaganda Department, internet censorship has now become a central issue that requires the cooperation of more than 14 government ministries. China is also the first country to employ more than 30,000 internet police to monitor online activities. So, what is causing the online community’s increasing attention? It is the astounding increase in the number of Chinese internet users, a group that has already reached 384 million (almost a quarter of the world’s total users).

To ensure the effectiveness of the GFW (Great Firewall), keyword filtering and self-censorship are commonly used. Filtering keywords is easy to understand; the Chinese government has a long list of “sensitive words” such as “Dalai Lama” or “Tiananmen Square Massacre”. Links to these words are blocked. Self-censorship is a term that does not exist in the U.S., but in China, websites practice self-censorship by voluntarily blocking “keywords” that fall into categories of masked words, sensitive words and taboo words. Self-censorship works through the punishment (criticized, fined or closed down) of websites that do not follow the rules.

Using proxy servers is a way to overcome internet surveillance. Sites such as wujie.net provide tools and services of excellent quality; for example, “huofenghuang” (fire phoenix) is one convenient tool to access foreign websites. The Chinese government is clearly not indifferent– the GFW has only just upgraded itself and is blocking more and more proxies and circumvention tools. But the number of Chinese netizens who join in to “scale the wall” never decreases. Based on a recent survey of over 5000 netizens published on China Digital Times (an independent Chinese media), two-thirds “scale the wall” on a daily basis, and about 50% are students. More than 70% of these people scale the wall just to use Twitter or read foreign news. And this ironic tug of war between the government and netizens will just continue to heat up.

Tagged with: firewall, china, PRC, civil rights, your rights online