A big thanks to Dashlane for making this exploration
possible. Keep your online accounts and passwords secure
with Dashlane.com/theexploration and get ten percent off your first year of Premium. 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
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