With 618 million Internet users, China’s population is more connected than any other
society in the world.
Yet for the authoritarian Chinese government, this limitless access to information poses
a threat to its control of free expression.
To counter people’s access to alternative viewpoints, the government has developed a
formidable system of censorship to restrict the content of media available for public
consumption.
When it first came out, China thought the Internet could be a wonderful thing.
But then reality set in.
The Internet was uncontrollable.
It shifted power to the individual in unprecedented ways.
So, The Communist party’s leaders began building the country’s second great wall:
a firewall of censorship.
In 1998, with the Internet quickly gaining popularity, the Party feared the newly formed
China Democracy Party -- or CDP -- would use the web as a tool to gather support in a way
the party elites might not be able to control.
Thus, the CDP was immediately banned and its leaders were arrested and imprisoned.
That same year, construction of the Great Firewall began.
Misleadingly known as the "Golden Shield," a more accurate name for the firewall project
would have been the “Golden Curtain,” because it signaled the end of the run for
many websites in China.
Before long, thousands of domains were blocked.
Users could get through the blackout with workarounds like proxy servers and secure
VPNs, but those were cumbersome and increasingly ineffective against the ever powerful blockade
enacted by the government.
Today, you can’t access any Google website in China including gmail, drive, maps, and
this website, YouTube.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are unreachable as is Bing and most of Yahoo! China’s four
million bloggers have to use sites other than Blogspot and WordPress, the two most popular
quick-writing platforms in the rest of the world.
China employs an army-sized force to not only block web content, but also to constantly
monitor user activity.
There are more than two million Chinese Internet police officers.
If you speak out, or try to defy the Great Firewall, you disappear.
Amnesty International says China "has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists
and cyber-dissidents in the world."
One of the first examples of this came in 2004, when Chinese journalist Shi Tao used
his Yahoo! email account to send the government’s latest list of banned topics to a pro-democracy
website in New York.
China’s response was swift.
It asked Yahoo! for the name behind the email account, the exact contents of the message,
and the exact location where the account was accessed.
Yahoo! complied, and Tao was immediately arrested, charged with leaking state secrets, and -- after
a two-hour show trial -- sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Sending such a strong message to its citizens that the government has complete control over
the Internet comes at a high price.
The younger generations in China think The Communist Party’s excessive control is harmful
and insulting.
Academics can’t gain access to scientific journals, business people can’t communicate
with colleagues around the world, and China’s leaders -- with their long history of corruption
-- can’t be investigated.
Part of the reason why the government has gotten away with all this, is because of the
country’s feverish pace of economic and social progress.
Since 1978, the average income in China has gone from $200 a year to $6,000.
This 3,000 percent increase has given the Communist Party a huge reservoir of goodwill.
But instead of using this success as a foundation to cultivate a more progressive relationship
with its people, the government is continuing to tighten its chokehold on freedom of expression.
In 2011, China’s leaders saw how powerful a tool social media was to people who sought
to challenge or even overthrow authoritarian governments in the Middle East.
And last year, China even experienced this firsthand when over one-hundred thousand protesters
took to the streets in Hong Kong to directly challenge its authority.
In response, The Communist Party’s rolled out its latest weapon called The Great Cannon,
in which it launches devastating Distributed Denial of Service attacks against websites
like GreatFire.org, that help Chinese Internet users get around The Great Firewall.
According to Internet researchers, the cannon allows China to intercept foreign web traffic
as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code, and then redirect the traffic back against
specific targets.
It’s similar to a cyber weapon developed and used by the US National Security Agency.
But, while the N.S.A.
uses its program for targeted surveillance, the Chinese are using the Great Cannon for
aggressive censorship.
The question is, at the rate at which Chinese are coming online, how much longer will the
government get away with arguing that its heavy handed censorship is being done to protect
the people, when it’s so obviously being done to ensure the survival of The Communist
Party?
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This video was edited by Brendan Plank.
Until next time, for TDC, I’m Bryce Plank.