Facebook, Youtube and Google are the world’s three most popular websites in the world and what do they have in common? You are not able to access them in China. How is that possible? China has an army of government workers who block and filter the Internet in the worlds biggest censorship operation. It’s nickname: The Great Firewall of China.
Here is the situation: China has 731 million Internet users and those users have severely limited online access. Strict censorship is nothing new in China but the online restrictions have been tightened by President Xi Jinping. These online restrictions are the tightest around political sensitive events like for example the death of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in July. During the Communist Party congress in October, China extended the online restrictions by the blocking of the American messaging system Whatsapp and clamping down on virtual private networks, VPN’s, which are commonly used to get around the great firewall of China. At one stage even Winnie the Pooh was banned after bloggers used the cartoon character to depict the Chinese president Xi Jinping. Another example of the excessive restrictions of the Chinese government is the ban on the word Toad on social media. The word Toad and searches like ‘big yellow duck’ were forbidden after a giant inflatable yellow toad in Bejing was compared to former president Jiang Zemin. At least 50.000 people in China are employed as to filter out keywords and to block websites that the Chinese government disapproves of. Also, there is an army of social media influencers who by estimate post 480 million pro-government comments a year. Crucially, the Chinese government gets tech and telecom companies to enforce the Chinese rules or, if they don’t, to face punishment. The result? China is, followed by Syria, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom according to the Freedom House (a United States based NGO). Iceland and Estonia come out best in Freedom House’s ranking. One aim of the censorship is to keep the Chinese web free of its foreign influence. President Xi Jinping calls this cyber sovereignty. The argument is this: most countries regulate the internet to some extend, like banning websites that promote hate, but with more than half of its 1.4 billion population online, China argues that it wants to protect social order and national security. Just regulation the Internet to some extend is, according to president Xi Jinping, not enough. This strict censorship has, of course, a lot of critics. These Chinese critics argue that the great firewall reflects the states paranoid fear of opposition to the government and limits free speech, obstructs innovation and prevents the spread of important ideas. For example, students and academics are not able to access Google Scholar. If other countries, for example Russia and other like minded countries, follow China’s example and successfully set restrictions, the vision behind the founding of the internet as an unrestricted global exchange of information could be seriously scaled back.
