Every year the Human Rights NGO Freedom House publishes a report on internet freedom around
the world. 65 countries are assessed and in the most recent report, the People’s Republic of China
ranks in an impressive…last place. This is because of what is called the
Great Firewall, one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive lists of restricted websites,
apps, images, and phrases. Everything on it cannot be viewed by internet users in China.
Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitch, and Pintrest;
Every major media platform in the west is blocked. Other banned websites include most pornography
sites, the BBC, online gambling sites, Amazon, the New York Times, and Discord.
There’s even a handy website where you can check if your website is blocked.
It isn’t only the big league sites that are banned. Pro-Democracy and anti-censorship
sites are also restricted, no matter how small they are. Not all of these sites are “banned”,
per say, but made extremely difficult to access. Restricted websites may be moved to
page 10 of search results, have their loading speed throttled, or may only partially load.
But it isn’t just websites that get blocked. Words, phrases,
and images can all be restricted either temporarily or permanently.
One of the most highly censored topics is any information about the Tienanmen Square Massacre
of 1989. Any mention of the event is prohibited, and related words like “Tank Man” and “4 June” are
banned from being searched or sent over instant messaging. The phrase “Big Yellow Duck” was banned
in 2013 after pranksters edited a photograph of Tank Man to feature some giant ducks.
The 4th of June is humorously known as “Chinese Internet Maintenance Day” because many websites
become slow or stop working entirely in the days leading up to the anniversary,
all under the guise of scheduled server repair.
Movies and TV shows released in China need to be vetted, and potentially edited,
to fit propaganda rules and decency guidelines. The 2012 James Bond film Skyfall had to have a
scene cut where a Chinese security guard is killed,
and Men in Black III was edited to remove scenes showing a Chinese restaurant worker
actually being an alien. Anything that shows China or a Chinese person,
or Dictatorships, or Authority in General in a bad light is cut before a Chinese release.
Also anything LGBT related or scenes that are either too violent or too sexual.
As you can imagine audiences were left very confused at the Freddy Mercury film.
Other banned media include:
Plague Inc Battlefield 4
The film Seven Years in Tibet. I can’t imagine why.
South Park ASMR videos
Movies where animals talk. Movies including time travel.
And The Big Bang Theory. Well, at least they’re doing something right.
Contrary to popular belief, Winnie the Pooh is not banned in China. Internet searches
for Pooh bear were temporarily blocked in 2017 when Chinese political dissidents discovered
the hilarious fact that the President of China, Xi Jinping, looks like the character.
Later still, in February 2018 when Party officials agreed to give Xi the Presidency
for the rest of his life, numerous search phrases were temporarily banned to stop people complaining
about the change online. These phrases included;
10,000 years
Disagree Shameless
Personality Life-Long
and the letter “N”. N being used in Mathematics to denote any number.
When the dissident’s rage subsided, these restrictions were of course lifted.
However, some things you would expect to be banned...aren’t.
The English Wikipedia page for the Tienanmen massacre is unblocked.
1984 by George Orwell is completely legal and uncensored.
The Mad Max films were rejected from cinema release, but you can get them on DVD or VHS, same
with Back to the Future. The hope being that the tiny percentage of people who actually seek out a
DVD are politically insignificant and the number of Chinese people who can read or speak English
is a very small percent of the population. Peppa Pig is legal and insanely popular
for some reason despite an otherwise total ban on talking animals in media.
James Cameron’s Avatar, which shows a native population rising up against a colonialist force,
is only illegal in 2D. Cinemas were only allowed to show the film in 3D, with Communist Party
officials hoping that viewers would be so amazed by the visuals that they wouldn’t pay
attention to the message. They were right but only because Avatar is a completely forgettable film.
So why keep these things out in the open? Why ban the letter “N”, which could be used for
political dissent, but not a book or a movie that is actually about political dissent?
Because otherwise you’d have nothing to lose if you were to rebel.
For Party officials the goal is to give the illusion of political pluralism,
just enough to make sure people don’t think they’re being restricted.
But the thing is, all of this can be circumvented by using a VPN, which encrypts data and bypasses
the firewall. There are plenty of Chinese people on twitter, from government shills
to anime artists, and 29% of Chinese people have used a VPN in the past month.
Another problem the Chinese government faces is when Chinese citizens go abroad.
Unlike the similarly oppressive North Korea, Chinese citizens are free to travel and study
in many western countries, which may expose them to other viewpoints that they’ll bring
back and spread around China. The solution is to set up an almost alternative digital ecosystem,
a protective bubble that Chinese citizens don’t need or don’t want to venture out of.
For example, WeChat - which has made itself the single most important app for any modern Chinese
citizen. It’s a messaging app, a social media, a money transfer app, gaming, maps, and reviews. It
even has apps within the app to keep users using inside at all times. This is “good”
because it can also be used for surveillance and control, with tacking software included in
the code and politically charged messages being automatically deleted. It’s no surprise the CEO
of the company behind WeChat is a card-carrying member of the ruling Communist Party.
There is also a Chinese equivalent to Google, Amazon, and Facebook. When visiting the west to
study or to travel, there’s no need to watch western media at the hotel or to get western
social media when studying in the USA. All the comforts of home are right there on your phone.
Or, you could even sidestep the foreign travel entirely by visiting one of China’s many
replicas of famous monuments. Why visit France, with it’s smelly French people,
foreign languages, and long plane ride, when you can visit the replica in Tianducheng?
Or visit the much bigger, much more impressive Tower Bridge replica in Jiangsu? Or the even
more leaning Tower of Pisa in Shanghai? Hey look, they’re even building a copy of the Holocaust!
There is also the supposed “Social Credit system” where citizens are given a score
which rises or falls based on how they live their lives. Positive actions like hard work
and loyalty to the regime are rewarded; negative actions like paying bills late or jaywalking
loses you points and privileges like the ability to board a plane. Alas, this system doesn’t exist;
it was a single proposal by the central government in 2013 and has yet to be acted
on at all. Head on over to China and ask them what their social credit score is and you’ll
be greeted with a blunt “huh?” or “what?” So at least China isn’t as bad as that.
Is there any hope for the dissidents of the regime? Yes.
Using encrypted messaging apps like Signal, a network of ordinary people quietly share around
banned articles and resistance information. Dissident groups host their content on Amazon
Web Servers, which encrypts all data passing through it, so censors don’t know what web traffic
is legitimate and what traffic is from a banned website. They’ve adopted a new lingo to confuse
censors when talking on weChat – “ladder” and “Vietnamese pho noodles” is slang for
VPN service. The Chinese for “Narrow neck bottle” sounds awfully similar to “Xi Jinping”,
while “ZF” is short for the government. And of course, as bad as cryptocurrency is (a
story for another time), activists in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang have been storing
their money in Bitcoin which cannot be seized, taxed, or traced back to them.
But for the most part, many citizens don’t really care.
They either don’t believe there is a different internet outside of their own...or they believe
censorship is a good thing to preserve national cohesion. As long as they’re comfortable, they
don’t care about politics or the outside world. Whatever side of the Great Firewall you fall on,
it looks like the grass is always less green on the other side.