The Great Firewall of China (abbreviated to GFW) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in the Internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google search, Facebook) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Besides censorship, the GFW has also had an impact on the development of China's internal internet economy by nurturing domestic companies and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.
The term Great Firewall of China is a portmanteau of firewall and the Great Wall of China, and is thought to have been coined by Geremie Barmé in 1997.
Video Great Firewall
History
The political and ideological background of the GFW Project is considered to be one of Deng Xiaoping's favorite sayings in the early 1980s: "If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in." (Chinese: ????,??????????????; pinyin: D?k?i chu?nghù, x?nxi?n k?ngqì hé c?ngying jiù huì yìq? jìnlái.) The saying is related to a period of the economic reform of China that became known as the "socialist market economy". Superseding the political ideologies of the Cultural Revolution, the reform led China towards a market economy and opened up the market for foreign investors. Nonetheless, despite the economic freedom, values and political ideas of the Communist Party of China have had to be protected by "swatting flies" of other unwanted ideologies.
The Internet in China arrived in 1994, as the inevitable consequence of and supporting tool for the "socialist market economy". Gradually, while Internet availability has been increasing, the Internet has become a common communication platform and tool for trading information.
The Ministry of Public Security took initial steps to control Internet use in 1997, when it issued comprehensive regulations governing its use. The key sections, Articles 4-6, are:
Individuals are prohibited from using the Internet to: harm national security; disclose state secrets; or injure the interests of the state or society. Users are prohibited from using the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit information that incites resistance to the PRC Constitution, laws, or administrative regulations; promotes the overthrow of the government or socialist system; undermines national unification; distorts the truth, spreads rumors, or destroys social order; or provides sexually suggestive material or encourages gambling, violence, or murder. Users are prohibited from engaging in activities that harm the security of computer information networks and from using networks or changing network resources without prior approval.
In 1998, the Communist Party of China feared that the China Democracy Party (CDP) would breed a powerful new network that the party elites might not be able to control. The CDP was immediately banned, followed by arrests and imprisonment. That same year, the GFW project was started. The first part of the project lasted eight years and was completed in 2006. The second part began in 2006 and ended in 2008. On 6 December 2002, 300 people in charge of the GFW project from 31 provinces and cities throughout China participated in a four-day inaugural "Comprehensive Exhibition on Chinese Information System". At the exhibition, many western high-tech products, including Internet security, video monitoring and human face recognition were purchased. It is estimated that around 30,000-50,000 police are employed in this gigantic project.
Maps Great Firewall
Origins of Chinese Internet law
China's view of the internet is as "Internet sovereignty": the notion that the internet inside the country is part of the country's sovereignty and should be governed by the country.
While the United States and several other western countries passed laws creating computer crimes beginning in the 1970s, China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC) passed CL97, a law that criminalizes "cyber crimes" , which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes among many things the dissemination of pornographic material and the usurping of "state secrets."
Some Chinese judges were critical of CL97, calling it ineffective and unenforceable. However, the NPC claimed it intentionally left the law "flexible" so that it could be open to future interpretation and development. Given the gaps in the law, the central government of China relies heavily on its administrative body, the State Council, to determine what falls under the definitions, and their determinations are not required to go through the NPC legislative process. As a result, the CPC has ended up relying heavily on state regulation to carry out CL97.
The latter definition of online activities punishable under CL97, or "crimes carried out over computer networks" is used as justification for the Great Firewall and can be cited when the government blocks any ISP, gateway connections, or any access to anything on the internet. The definition also includes using the internet to distribute information considered "harmful to national security," and using the internet to distribute information considered "harmful to public order, social stability, and Chinese morality." The central government relies heavily on its State Council regulators to determine what specific online behavior and speech fall under these definitions.
Campaigns and crackdowns
As part of the Great Firewall, beginning in 2003 China started the Golden Shield Project , a massive surveillance and censoring system, the hardware for which was provided by mostly U.S. companies, including Cisco Systems. The project was completed in 2006 and is now carried out in buildings with machines manned by civilians and supervised by China's national police force, the Public Security Bureau (PSB). The main operating activities of the gatekeepers at the Golden Shield Project include monitoring domestic websites and email and searching for politically sensitive language and calls to protest. When damaging content is found, local PSB officials can be dispatched to investigate or make arrests. However, by late 2007 the Golden Shield Project proved to operate sporadically at best, as users had long adapted to internet blocking by using proxy servers, among other strategies, to make communications and circumnavigate to blocked content.
In February 2008, the Chinese government announced "Operation Tomorrow," an effort to crack down on youth usage of internet cafés to play online games and view content declared illegal. Internet cafés, an extremely popular way of getting online in developing countries where fewer people can afford a personal computer, are regulated by the Chinese government and by local Chinese government officials. Minors (in China, those under the age of 18) are not allowed into Internet cafés, although this law is widely ignored and when enforced, has spurred the creation of underground "Black Web Bars" that will be visited by those underage. As of 2008 internet cafés were required to register every customer in a log when they used the internet there; these records may be confiscated by local government officials and the PSB. To illustrate local regulation of internet cafés, in one instance, a government official in the town of Gedong lawfully banned internet cafés from operating in the town because he believed them to be harmful to minors, who frequented them to play online games (including those considered violent) and surf the internet. However, internet cafés in this town simply went underground and most minors were not deterred from visiting them.
China has blocked access to all of Wikipedia at times, and generally blocks access to politically sensitive Wikipedia articles, and in 2017 discussed plans for its own version of Wikipedia.
Blocking methods
Some commonly used technical methods for censoring are:
Effectiveness and Impact
Some research evidence has indicated that suspicion of the Great Firewall in China and the sense that one is being surveilled online leads to chilled speech and self-censorship, which has been more effective at blocking internet content than the Great Firewall has been.
The Great Firewall is a form of trade protectionism that has allowed China to grow its own internet giants: Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu. China has its own version of many foreign web properties, for example: Youku Tudou (youtube), weibo.com (Twitter), Renren and WeChat (Facebook), Ctrip (Orbitz and others), zhihu (Quora). With nearly one quarter of the global internet population (700 million users), the internet behind the GFW can be considered a "parallel universe" to the Internet that exists outside.
Censored content
Mainland Chinese Internet censorship programs have censored Web sites that include (among other things):
- Web sites belonging to "outlawed" or suppressed groups, such as pro-democracy activists and Falun Gong
- News sources that often cover topics that are considered defamatory against China, such as police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy sites. These sites include Voice of America and the Chinese edition of BBC News.
- Sites related to the Taiwanese government, media, or other organizations, including sites dedicated to religious content, and most large Taiwanese community websites or blogs.
- Web sites that contain anything the Chinese authorities regard as obscenity or pornography
- Web sites relating to criminal activity
- Sites linked with the Dalai Lama, his teachings or the International Tibet Independence Movement
- Most blogging sites experience frequent or permanent outages
- Web sites deemed as subversive
Blocked Web sites are indexed to a lesser degree, if at all, by some Chinese search engines. This sometimes has considerable impact on search results.
According to The New York Times, Google has set up computer systems inside China that try to access Web sites outside the country. If a site is inaccessible, then it is added to Google China's blacklist. However, once unblocked, the Web sites will be reindexed. Referring to Google's first-hand experience of the great firewall, there is some hope in the international community that it will reveal some of its secrets. Simon Davies, founder of London-based pressure group Privacy International, is now challenging Google to reveal the technology it once used at China's behest. "That way, we can understand the nature of the beast and, perhaps, develop circumvention measures so there can be an opening up of communications." "That would be a dossier of extraordinary importance to human rights," Davies says. Google has yet to respond to his call.
Circumvention
Because the Great Firewall blocks destination IP addresses and domain names and inspects the data being sent or received, a basic censorship circumvention strategy is to use proxy nodes and encrypt the data. Most circumvention tools combine these two mechanisms.
- Proxy servers outside China can be used, although using just a simple open proxy (HTTP or SOCKS) without also using an encrypted tunnel (such as HTTPS) does little to circumvent the sophisticated censors.
- Companies can establish regional Web sites within China. This prevents their content from going through the Great Firewall of China; however, it requires companies to apply for local ICP licenses.
- Onion routing and Garlic routing, such as I2P or Tor, can be used.
- Freegate, Ultrasurf, and Psiphon are free programs that circumvent the China firewall using multiple open proxies, but still behave as though the user is in China.
- VPNs (virtual private network) and SSH (secure shell) are the powerful and stable tools for bypassing surveillance technologies. They use the same basic approaches, proxies and encrypted channels, used by other circumvention tools, but depend on a private host, a virtual host, or an account outside of China, rather than open, free proxies.
- Open application programming interface (API) used by Twitter which enables to post and retrieve tweets on sites other than Twitter. "The idea is that coders elsewhere get to Twitter, and offer up feeds at their own URLs--which the government has to chase down one by one." says Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
- Reconfiguration at the end points of communication, encryption, discarding reset packets according to the TTL value (time to live) by distinguishing those resets generated by the Firewall and those made by end user, not routing any further packets to sites that have triggered blocking behavior.
Unblocking
In 2008 the English-language BBC website (but not the Chinese language website) was unblocked.
Exporting technology
Reporters Without Borders suspects that countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Belarus have obtained surveillance technology from China although the censorships in these countries are not much in comparing to China.
Protest in China
Despite strict government regulations, the Chinese people are continuing to protest against their government's attempt to censor the Internet. The more covert protesters will set up secure SSH and VPN connections using tools such as UltraSurf. They can also utilize the widely available proxies and virtual private networks to fanqiang (??, "climb over the wall"), or bypass the GFW. Active protest is not absent. Chinese people will post their grievances online, and on some occasions, have been successful. In 2003, the death of Sun Zhigang, a young migrant worker, sparked an intense, widespread online response from the Chinese public, despite the risk of the government's punishment. A few months later, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao abolished the Chinese law that led to the death of Sun. Ever since, dissent has regularly created turmoil on the Internet in China. Also in January 2010, when Google announced that it will no longer censor its Web search results in China, even if this means it might have to shut down its Chinese operations altogether, many Chinese people went to the company's Chinese offices to display their grievances and offer gifts, such as flowers, fruits and cigarettes.
Compliance
Chinese corporate statutes mandate that domestic and foreign internet companies doing business in Mainland China cooperate with its Great Firewall efforts. The Chinese subsidiaries of American companies Yahoo!, Google, (Google services are blocked but Google still has a presence in China) and Microsoft comply with this condition of operating there. While the leadership of these companies regularly express their distaste for China's Great Firewall policies, in the same vein they consider it a necessary part of doing business in China and better than the alternative, which would be to not have any China business at all. Jerry Yang, a founder of Yahoo!, additionally has implied that the presence of foreign internet companies in China will eventually help bring about less internet restriction in China.
Reaction of United States
United States Trade Representative's (USTR's) " National Trade Estimate Report " in 2016 referred the China's digital Great Firewall: "China's filtering of cross-border Internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers." Claude Barfield, the American Enterprise Institute's expert of International trade, suggested that American government should bring a case against the Firewall, a huge trade barrier, in the World Trade Organization in January 2017.
See also
- Fang Binxing, considered to be the Father of the Great Firewall of China
- Bamboo Curtain
- Berlin Wall
- Great Cannon -- A distributed denial-of-service attack tool co-located with the Great Firewall.
- GreatFire -- An organization monitoring the Great Firewall.
- Great Wall of China -- the physical analogy and the origin of the term, protecting China from foreign invasions in ancient times.
- Blocking of Wikipedia by China
- Censorship in China
- Green Dam Youth Escort
- Internet in China
- Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
- Internet censorship circumvention
- International Freedom of Expression Exchange - monitors Internet censorship in China
- Media of China
- Politics of China
- Splinternet
- Who Controls the Internet?
- Cypher
Notes
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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