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China’s Internet Censorship Nightmare

Whenever Internet censorship is mentioned, the first country many people think of probably is China. Perhaps most Chinese people would feel mortified and helpless when it comes to the Great Firewall that is filtering everything online.
Four years ago, when western people talked about the strict Internet control in China, some Chinese would just shrug, because the situation was actually not as bad as western media exaggerated. Chinese users living in China mainland could still browse most of the foreign websites. Now, in 2009, the situation has completely changed: some Chinese popular literature websites have to close up regularly to avoid trouble; many websites either close up certain sections or invent some creative ways for users to register (so that it will be difficult for the Internet police to register); service providers have to stay alert all the time—once your users post something the government doesn’t like, you are dead! But even so, most users could still endure all mentioned above. The thing that really upset a huge number of people was that Google was asked to stop linking to all foreign websites—Chinese users cannot even see a snapshot of foreign web pages. At the era of web 2.0, when knowledge is supposed to be shared by the entire humankind, the Chinese government has deprived its people of the right of seeing the rest of the world.
It’s difficult to believe such thing happens in a society where around 300 million people are using the Internet. The question everyone would want to ask is why? The Chinese government said they have justifiable reasons. Chinese Central TV and related administrations accused Google of disseminating obscene information that are harmful to the harmonisation of the Chinese society. On Sina.com (the biggest Chinese news portal), 1256 people replied to an article saying Google is “fooling Chinese people and the government”, but only 40 feedbacks can be displayed—of course all the 40 feedbacks are supporting the argument of that article. Any one who has read the article would wonder if it was the same person—an Internet police perhaps—who wrote all those feedbacks.
Ordinary Internet users in China would definitely choose to enjoy the borderless information sharing. Who wants to be constantly constrained and monitored anyway? But unfortunately, the Chinese government choose not only to block the rest of the world out, but also to silence alternative views from its own people.
After the Nation Day on 1 October, the Chinese government promoted new filtering softwares to tighten its Internet control and most anti-filtering softwares became useless. Meanwhile, the US-based IT companies continue to release updated softwares like Freegate to allow users in China to breakthrough the Great Firewall. The technological war between the filtering and the anti-filtering softwares has risen to a higher level. However, when can the Chinese government realise strict internet censorship is driving its dream of building a harmonised society further and further away?

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I wrote these articles for China Digital Times, a bilingual service covering “China’s social and political transition and its emerging role in the world.” They publish news reports as well as opinion pieces. Some of their articles are translated from other Chinese news websites. The website is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project (BCIP) out of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

China Blocked Social Networking Websites


Picture by Xianyunyehe

When the whole world is talking about the benefits brought by social networking technologies, China decides these technologies are bad and subsequently blocks the access to Facebook and Twitter from China mainland. But what’s the big deal about these social networking sites? Does it hurt that much to let Chinese people networking a bit online?
According to Huanqiu Newspaper, the Tibet-independence and Xinjiang-independence supporters who ran the riots earlier this year used Facebook to connect with each other. And Twitter managed to disseminate news about riot in Xinjiang quicker than the Chinese national news services. The Chinese government believed they would lose the control of the situation if they lost the control of information. Then immediately after the riots in Xinjiang, many popular social networking sites were either blocked or closed down.
So, several Facebook groups and tweets contributed to the fact that all netizens living in China mainland are now deprived of the right of using Facebook and Twitter? When we think about it, we can neither blame those social networking sites nor those Tibet-and-Xinjiang-independence supporters—the former simply served as communication tool, and the latter simply used the tool. The real problem here is that the Chinese government adopted an extremely negative attitude towards social networking sites. And the ordinary Chinese netizens became the victims.
In the era of Web 2.0, social networking websites rely on mass-scale online activities. It’s cleverer for a government to fully embrace new online technologies rather than to deny them. First and foremost, the Internet technologies are impossible to be killed unless a government chooses to destruct all the telephone infrastructures. Second, many incidents in the past have proved that the government can generate positive public relations through social networking sites. Take the 2008 presidential contest between Obama and Hillary as example. Both Obama and Hillary had huge number of followers on Twitter, but what made Obama a winner was he was following hundreds of thousands people while Hillary was following no one. This is certainly not the only example of the effective utilisation of social networking for political purpose. The British government has also been clever enough to ask public servants to tweet regularly. If the Chinese government was able to use the same logic, people would probably receive information about the riots from the government first, not from those Xinjiang-independence supporters.
This sort of Internet control is like a vicious cycle. The more you try to control, the more you lose. Now the Chinese netizens are dissatisfied with the tightening censorship—more and more users will start to protest if the online blockage lasts longer. Furthermore, the internet censorship in China has done huge damage to the international image of the whole Chinese nation. The Chinese Internet filtering system is dubbed the “Great Firewall”, which probably is one of the worst humiliations that the Great Wall of China has ever had in thousands of years.