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You’re in china and you want to circumvent the internet firewall.
As you browse the web from site to site, you constantly encounter websites the government
doesn’t want you to see: YouTube, blocked.
Twitter, blocked.
Google, blocked.
Wikipedia, blocked.
Facebook, blocked.
The government doesn’t want its citizens using these sites.
If they did, democracy would be just around the corner.
A quick google search for ‘Tank Man’ at Tiananmen Square would reveal the oppression
of the regime; thousands would be in the streets protesting the government to demand their
human rights.
But for now, the population of China is trapped behind an impenetrable firewall of internet
censorship and spying.
And like with the physical wall of china in days of old, the great firewall of china is
almost impossible to get around.
But wait.
There’s already a commenter who’s posted below, ‘I’m watching this on YouTube in
China lol XD’.
And as it turns out, my portrayal of internet use in China -prevalent in Western media - is
kind of wrong.
To access YouTube, Twitter, Facebook- any blocked site in China, one need only pay a
few dollars a month for a VPN, a Virtual Private Network, which can hide your IP address and
location, and, done.
Government censors evaded.
Read about any banned topic.
Follow me on Twitter @williamcfox and send me Chinese government-banned words to your
heart's content.
Please don’t do that.
So why do we all have this image in our minds of China’s internet as censored and controlled
by some Big Brother type figure just waiting to throw you in prison for googling ‘democracy’?
What is the Great Firewall of China if you can just hop it like a ‘great chinese fence’?
The answer leads us to a place perhaps more insidious.
How do you control the internet without giving the impression to the average citizen that
you’re doing so?
The Tiananmen Square protests weren’t just a political awakening for the student protesters;
it was an awakening for the Communist Party of China, which since the death of Chairman
Mao had been implementing changes into Chinese society some saw as opening a pandora's box
of civil unrest.
During Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s, he and his allies within the Communist
Party possesed near full control of the media.
The existing Propaganda Department was shut down and replaced with something more sympathetic
to Mao’s policies (1,37).
Newspaper, radio, and bulletin boards were used to broadcast the messages of the party,
mobilizing thousands to wave Mao’s book of quotations and reeducate so-called ‘reactionary
elements’ of the party (2,138).
Even fine arts like opera and film were meant to reinforce the presence of the state in
citizen’s private lives (1,38).
But after Mao’s death in 1976, new Chinese leadership began a process of reforms, ‘opening
up’ China without getting rid of the Communist Party (2,150).
De-Maoization, as it was called, included a slow move towards a market economy, some
private ownership of farms, and critical to our story, limited commercialization of the
media (3,113).
As a means of legitimizing central party control, media investigations of local governments
were allowed.
The 80’s saw a reformed Central Propaganda Department, which oversaw a freer exchange
of ideas in society (1,40).
But there was disagreement within the party between those who thought economic reforms
went too far and wanted homogenous public opinion, and those who wanted the economy
slowly liberalized, and some free expression allowed.
The only thing these two corners of the party could agree on was that loud outbursts of
dissent needed to be put down (4).
And that is exactly what happened when student protests in Tiananmen Square in April of 1989
spread to other Chinese cities.
The world was watching when the protests were violently suppressed.
For hardliners inside the party, it was evidence that the government had been too soft, that
the laxness on speech over the years since Mao's death was damaging their cause (4).
A suppression of the media followed.
But it must be said this suppression never reached anywhere near the level as during
the Cultural Revolution, and focused a lot of energy on opinion influencers- an attempt
to stop community action by stopping the people who organize it (3,117).
Like a tea kettle, the government learned to maintain control it needed to find some
form of a middle ground between unforgiving censorship of all political dissent, and complete
openness, lest society boil over.
This would prove a valuable lesson when revolutionary technology would arrive just a few years later.
In the early 90’s, economic growth remained the top priority of the Chinese Communist
Party.
And so it was logical when the internet came to China in 1994- that this driver of the
economic future would be embraced by the government and spread across the country.
15 years later, in 2009, over a quarter of Chinese citizens used the internet.
Today, it’s over 800 million people, close to 60% of the country (6).
That’s more than double the entire US population.
But the world wide web came to China with strings attached.
The central party immediately issued regulations on the new technology.
Such regulation included the ominous and expansive detail that the internet couldn’t be used
to harm the “security and interests of the state,” (5,81).
And so, between 1994 and now, a massive state apparatus for control of the internet emerged.
The original operation for controlling the internet was through the Ministry of Public
Security and was called the ‘Golden Shield Project’, but it’s better known today
as ‘The Great Firewall of China’(7).
The Party primarily controls the internet through site blocking, topic filtering, rearranging
search results, mass surveillance of web traffic, and self-censorship imposed on private companies.
First and foremost, the Chinese government simply blocks websites.
We’ve already gone through some of them: Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia.
Part of the reason is that these sites won’t self-censor content.
Well, Google might be caving on that, but that’s a topic for another time.
Another reason for blocking sites is because for each of the examples I mentioned, a domestic
Chinese copycat site is available- Baidu for search, Weibo for friends, Taobao for shopping,
or Youku for video.
And as domestic sites, each of these alternatives will better serve the government's interest
and the Chinese Economy at-large.
For the second method of control, the Party filters words and topics of conversation.
For the average Chinese citizen scrolling through their feed on Weibo, equivalent to
Twitter, posts they make or comments they leave may be automatically filtered for review.
Discussing the June 4th events at Tiananmen or notable activists associated with them
will likely be filtered.
Discussing the American government-funded media organization Voice of America, filtered
(8).
After constitutional changes allowing Xi Jinping to stay in office without term limits, words
and phrases like “Emperor”, “Control”, “1984”, “Animal Farm”, and “Brave
New World” were banned.
And yes, any comparisons between Xi and Winnie the Pooh were banned too (9;10).
The actual leg work for reviewing filtered posts is done by millions of online censors-
at least 2 million, according to official sources (11).
Some of these are government workers, but a lot of work is done by private firms, which
are obliged to hire censors as part of establishing themselves in the Chinese market (12).
Depending on size, each website hires up to 1,000 censors to review posts, enforce Party
mandates on newly banned words, and often, to simply browse for suspicious material.
But again we encounter a grey area here, because while the government is fairly strict on certain
terms and topics, generally speaking, dissent is allowed on the Chinese internet.
You can complain about the government, even in an aggressive fashion.
What you can’t do is try to mobilize your community to action based on those complaints.
A fascinating research article which I’ve cited in the description, conducted a large-scale
experiment to study this phenomenon (13).
They found: “Chinese people can write the most vitriolic blog posts about even the top
Chinese leaders without fear of censorship, but if they write in support of or opposition
to an ongoing protest—or even about a rally in favor of a popular policy or leader—they
will be censored.”
It seems part of the lesson learned after Tiananmen Square- the lesson about finding
a middle ground to maintain control, was to let people voice opinions, but not to let
them congregate.
So why let people sound off at all?
Well, another aspect of internet control in China is mass surveillance.
A lot of this surveillance is aimed at influencers and thought leaders like journalists and writers,
but by law, the browsing activity of all internet users is gathered by internet service providers
and passed along to the government (3,122).
And this can naturally mean suppression of dissidents with a crowd behind them, but it
also means in a twisted way that the government can better know what its population wants,
and even use concentrated complaints about officials to make staffing decisions in local
offices (13).
But I don’t want to mince words here.
‘Whataboutisms’ on America aside, in my opinion, this is dystopian stuff.
The researchers I mentioned before called the Great Firewall, “the largest selective
suppression of human communication in the recorded history of any country,” (13).
And the suppression seems to be intensifying.
In 2013, Xi Jinping spearheaded a new committee called the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission
to oversee and guide the government bureaucracy managing the internet.
And naturally he made himself chairman (3,121;14).
Along with eliminating term limits in 2018, this move has placed Xi in position to mold
China’s internet for the foreseeable future (15).
Crackdowns on VPNs have been widely reported in the media, including the imprisonment of
a software developer, accused of operating a VPN to circumvent government blocks (16).
But despite the crackdown, use of VPNs continues to be widespread.
As we mentioned before, with a VPN, internet users can simply hop over the Firewall to
access banned sites.
Part of the reason this is still somewhat tolerated is business related.
Technology companies rely on VPNs in order to access things like GitHub, and the continued
growth of the Chinese economy demands open access the World Wide Web, not just a ‘China
Wide Web’.
The government knows this, and is therefore hamstrung from completely eliminating VPN
use, at least for now.
And the Communist Party isn’t in a huge rush.
That’s because they’ve learned another, more insidious lesson about the nature of
information exchange.
In her book ‘Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall’, Margaret
E. Roberts describes three methods the Party uses to control the internet.
The first is fear.
This is when the government uses punishment or threats of punishment to stop certain stories
or comments from being posted.
These tactics, like the repression in Maoist area, are immediately effective, but come
with drawbacks.
People are more likely to negatively respond to strongman efforts to censor them, and will
actively seek out information if they sense that the government is sensitive about it
being seen.
So outright suppression is usually reserved for leaders, protesters, or pesky journalists.
More commonly seen are two other tactics, what Roberts calls flooding and friction.
Flooding, refers to efforts of the government to drown out critical thought in a sea of
pro government messages, or sometimes just general confusion.
News embarrassing to the regime is subject to a deluge of confusing and contradictory
pro government articles and comments.
The hope is that the average citizen won’t take the time to figure it all out, and just
assume the waters are too muddied to know the truth.
Westerners will recognize these tactics from their use in Russia’s ongoing cyber warfare
efforts on US social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Since 2004, a so-called ‘50 cent party’ has operated in China.
It’s a group of students paid per post on behalf of the government (17).
The goal of these efforts is not to convince everyone, but rather to frustrate people,
make them give up trying to find the right answer in an ocean of contradiction.
This dynamic is also critical for the third and most unsettling tactic: friction.
Roberts defines friction as, “increasing the cost, either in time or money, of access
or spread of information.”
In other words, rather than simply banning a website with unflattering information about
the Communist Party, just make it a little slower to load.
Rather than arresting the organizers of a protest, just make the messenger app WeChat
lag in the areas you expect a gathering.
Ban some websites like Twitter and Wikipedia with the full knowledge that some will jump
the Firewall with a VPN, but most won’t.
These methods rely on a darker part of human nature: our impatience.
The weight of evidence shows that when it comes to internet content, people simply won’t
wait.
Look at the example of Google in 2010.
During a disagreement with the Chinese government, Google starting refusing to manipulate search
results as instructed.
As a result, the government directed ISPs to reject a quarter of Google’s traffic.
To be clear, the instructions weren’t to reject all traffic to Google, just some.
Nonetheless, Chinese users simply stopped using Google.
Usage numbers crashed over three years- their market share in China went from around 40%
to under 2%.
The mere sight of a loading bar had driven consumers to domestic chinese search engines.
Google was formally banned three years later, but it was already inconsequential.
In this way, impatience can serve the interest of the state.
Sure, you say, these tactics work on some, but dedicated, politically engaged citizens
will make the effort to circumvent the censor, wait for the page to load, call their friend
when messenger is down to ask if the protest was rescheduled.
But the trick is that the average citizen won’t.
They’ll just use the government-approved sites, hit the back button if a link loads
slow, or stay home rather than try to find a demonstration.
The average citizen won’t notice if 9 of the top 10 search results for Tiananmen square
have disappeared or been moved to page 4; they’ll just click the first result on page
one like everyone does.
The government doesn’t just hope, it knows a significant portion of people with busy
lives and limited time will just give up, or even more likely, fail to notice the manipulation
at all.
If you’re flipping through the dictionary, and no word appears between disseminule and
dissepiment, is it because a government censor made it so?
What word were you looking for again?
When people don’t feel the weight of the government censorship, they don’t act.
As internet use skyrockets, as more and more Chinese citizens are spending their days on
smartphones, the government is playing a huge role in how that internet is laid out.
Entertainment to the top, dissent to the bottom.
By using subtle manipulation over heavy-handedness, they’ll weave reality for over a billion
people.
With the world’s internet becoming ever more divided, it’s easy to sit back and
relax about our own.
China’s problems are china’s But is our situation really so simple?
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Later guys.