China’s Internet is on its way to become the world’s largest local area network (LAN), as China’s Internet firewall becomes increasingly sophisticated in order to handle Internet censorship. In the meantime, netizens in China are finding ways to “Fan Qiang”, 翻墙, (circumvent the Great Firewall) to access blocked websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Widely-used Firewall Bypassing Tools
An increasing number of netizens in China rely on virtual private networks (VPN) to access information that are blocked by the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall, also referred as the Golden Shield Project, is an Internet censorship project operated by the Chinese government. With a VPN connection, a netizen can securely connect to a network outside of China, bypass the China Firewall and access any website. It is difficult for China to block VPN connections, because VPN providers can easily change their IP addresses once they are blocked by China.
Cartoon by a Chinese netizen on China's Internet censorship policy.
There haven’t been accurate statistics showing the number of people who use VPN in China to avoid the Great Firewall; however, according to Radio Free Asia, more than ten overseas VPN providers are widely used by netizens in China. Besides using VPN, other firewall-evading tools include secure shell (SSH) access, proxy servers and open-source software such as Tor, an anonymity software.
In spring 2010, Jason Ng, the creator of Kenengba.com, distributed an online survey to evaluate people’s behaviors of scaling the Great Firewall in China. Among the 5,300 respondents, many people reported using more than one firewall-evading tool on the Internet to access websites blocked by the firewall. As statistics showed, only five percent of the surveyed used their companies’ VPN at work, while about 16 percent paid for VPN services. SSH, proxy servers and open-source software, all of which are comparatively cheaper than VPN, are among the top three tools preferred by netizens in China. The use of firewall-evading tools continues in the country.
Web Filter or Web Disturbance?
Quite a number of popular websites have been blocked by the Great Firewall in mainland China, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and some Google search services, to name a few. These websites are deemed as “dangerous” by the Chinese government.
Ironically, people in China seem not to understand the government’s thought. Watching videos on Youtube and visiting social network websites like Facebook are among the top reasons for people to scale the Great Firewall. People are looking for entertainment, relaxation and knowledge/information on the Internet, but to some extent, their regular web-surfing needs are interrupted by the firewall.
A lady shared her Internet experience of searching a simple term “sanitary towel” on an online search engine, which was blocked automatically as obscene terms. “I felt as if I had no dignity as a women or human!” she explained.
Netizens are annoyed by China's Great Firewall (GFW); netizens have created and circulated anti-firewall images/media.
For professionals in China, the Great Firewall scares them. One survey respondent has been annoyed by the firewall since 2003 when he began academic research on the Internet about China’s political issues. Similarly, for many companies such as Tencent, China’s largest and most used Internet service portal, using VPN is a necessary for developing business. Even professional, non-political websites are blocked by China’s firewall. Images of world’s most popular Formula 1 website, Autosport.com, are blocked, as one netizen reported in the survey.
The annoyance among netizens in China even tends to evolve into disappointment and dissatisfaction against the government. In the same survey, some respondents commented that the stricter Internet censorship revealed the government’s failure of properly regulating the Internet, and too much Internet censorship would infuriate more people in future.
Tension between the Government and its Netizens
The Chinese government is making efforts to “cleanse” the Internet’s contents. Not long ago, the government shut down many websites and peer-to-peer websites for anti-pornography purposes. Till now, any word that might have pornography implication will be blocked as an obscene word. In response, netizens began to type in Pinyin, special characters and symbols to express ideas, because the one defect of the firewall is that the filtering system is word-based rather than meaning-based.
In early 2010, Blogbus, a Chinese blog service provider, was blocked in mainland China. In the meantime, Google announced to stop self-censorship on its Google.cn search engine. The negotiation between Google and the government ended with Google’s decision of withdrawing part of its business from mainland China, a big pain for netizens in China. As a result, an increasing number of netizens made it a habit to scale the Great Firewall in order to access Google’s services
From a technical perspective, it is impossible for the Great Firewall to filter and censor everything that is defined obscene. In the meantime, it costs nothing or only several bucks for people to find firewall-evading tools while the government has spend more resources in order to enhance its firewall system. As a result, no one really feels afraid or helpless of the growing firewall; using firewall-evading tools has become an essential web-surfing skill in China.
Growing Censorship in Mainland
The Great Firewall (or the Golden Shield Project), 金盾工程, was created in 1998, when the Internet use became popular among people in China. The cost for the first stage of this project, as China Central Television estimated, totaled 800 million USD. The censorship does not cover Hong Kong and Macau, because they are special administrative regions in China.
The Great Firewall was effective in blocking “dangerous” information from mainland for several years. One could hardly search any information on sensitive political issues, such as the Tian’An Men Incident, negative stories about China’s top leaders and the Tibet riots in 2008.
However, due to ease-of-access and development of firewall-evading and anonymity technologies, it is much harder than before to block information from the Chinese public. However, the Chinese government is still trying to enhance censorship tools in hope of controlling free information flow. The Green Dam Youth Escort, more commonly known as Green Dam (绿坝), is a recent example.
The use of the Green Dam, approved by the government in mid 2009, was designed to filter inappropriate contents on the Internet. Since the approval, all computers for sale in mainland were required to pre-install Green Dam, although most computer producers and providers have ignored the request or pretend to obey.
The Green Dam Youth Escort software recognizes pornographic images by analyzing skin-coloured regions, causing the blocking of this image of pink color pigs. (Source: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/free-pink)
Gain or Loss?
It is true that strict censorship might prevent some people from accessing “inappropriate” information. From the government’s perspective, it might be helpful to stabilize the society and the reputation of the Communist Party in China.
Besides political concerns, there seems to be no obvious benefit of enhancing the Great Firewall. For economic development, many global businesses are scared away. Although some companies like Twitter are proactively looking for ways to provide service to Chinese netizens, there are also examples like Google that temporarily stopped doing business in the mainland market.
In addition, as some netizens commented in Jason’s survey and other online forums, the excessive censorship from the government will probably discourage more intellectuals and talents to contribute to the society or to respect the government. Sadly, Internet usage freedom has become one of the major reasons for some Chinese who live abroad not to return to China.
People in China have been informed with the story of Yu the Great, 大禹, who dredged new river channels instead of building more dams and successfully controlled heavy floods in his term. So it is true with information flow; but, in the eyes of the Chinese government, this ancient story is still not applicable for the current situation.
Sources
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http://www.cpd.com.cn
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http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://www.dailymotion.com
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http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk
http://blog.caing.com
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