Great Firewall

See also: Internet censorship in China

The Great Firewall of China (abbreviated to GFW) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in the Internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The impact includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google search, Facebook) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Besides censorship, the GFW has also had an effect on the development of China's internal internet economy by nurturing domestic companies and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.

Today, a number of politically sensitive Wikipedia entries continue to be censored by the Chinese government from users who do not use a secure connection.

The term Great Firewall of China is a portmanteau of firewall and the Great Wall of China, and is thought to have been coined in an article in Wired magazine in 1997.

Origins of Chinese Internet law

China's view of the internet is as "Internet sovereignty": the notion that the internet inside the country is part of the country's sovereignty and should be governed by the country.

While the United States and several other western countries passed laws creating computer crimes beginning in the 1970s, China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC) passed CL97, a law that criminalizes "cyber crimes" , which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes among many things the dissemination of pornographic material and the usurping of "state secrets."

Some Chinese judges were critical of CL97, calling it ineffective and unenforceable. However, the NPC claimed it intentionally left the law "flexible" so that it could be open to future interpretation and development. Given the gaps in the law, the central government of China relies heavily on its administrative body, the State Council, to determine what falls under the definitions, and their determinations are not required to go through the NPC legislative process. As a result, the CPC has ended up relying heavily on state regulation to carry out CL97.

The latter definition of online activities punishable under CL97, or "crimes carried out over computer networks" is used as justification for the Great Firewall and can be cited when the government blocks any ISP, gateway connections, or any access to anything on the internet. The definition also includes using the internet to distribute information considered "harmful to national security," and using the internet to distribute information considered "harmful to public order, social stability, and Chinese morality." The central government relies heavily on its State Council regulators to determine what specific online behavior and speech fall under these definitions.

Campaigns and crackdowns

As part of the Great Firewall, beginning in 2003 China started the Golden Shield Project , a massive surveillance and censoring system, the hardware for which was provided by mostly U.S. companies, including Cisco Systems. The project was completed in 2006 and is now carried out in buildings with machines manned by civilians and supervised by China's national police force, the Public Security Bureau (PSB). The main operating activities of the gatekeepers at the Golden Shield Project include monitoring domestic websites and email and searching for politically sensitive language and calls to protest. When damaging content is found, local PSB officials can be dispatched to investigate or make arrests. However, by late 2007 the Golden Shield Project proved to operate sporadically at best, as users had long adapted to internet blocking by using proxy servers, among other strategies, to make communications and circumnavigate to blocked content.

In February 2008, the Chinese government announced "Operation Tomorrow," an effort to crack down on youth usage of internet cafés to play online games and view content declared illegal. Internet cafés, an extremely popular way of getting online in developing countries where fewer people can afford a personal computer, are regulated by the Chinese government and by local Chinese government officials. Minors (in China, those under the age of 18) are not allowed into Internet cafés, although this law is widely ignored and when enforced, has spurred the creation of underground "Black Web Bars" that will be visited by those underage. As of 2008 internet cafés were required to register every customer in a log when they used the internet there; these records may be confiscated by local government officials and the PSB. To illustrate local regulation of internet cafés, in one instance, a government official in the town of Gedong lawfully banned internet cafés from operating in the town because he believed them to be harmful to minors, who frequented them to play online games (including those considered violent) and surf the internet. However, internet cafés in this town simply went underground and most minors were not deterred from visiting them.

Effectiveness and Impact

Some research evidence has indicated that suspicion of the Great Firewall in China and the sense that one is being surveilled online leads to chilled speech and self-censorship, which has been more effective at blocking internet content than the Great Firewall has been.

The Great Firewall is a form of trade protectionism that has allowed China to grow its own internet giants: Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu. China has it's own version of many foreign web properties. For example: Youku Tudou (youtube), weibo.com (Twitter), Renren and WeChat (Facebook), Ctrip (Orbitz and others), zhihu.com and plans for an internet encyclopedia. With nearly one quarter of the global internet population (700 million users), the internet behind the GFW can be consider a "parallel universe" to the Internet that exists outside.

Compliance

Chinese corporate statutes mandate that domestic and foreign internet companies doing business in Mainland China cooperate with its Great Firewall efforts. The Chinese businesses of American companies Yahoo!, Google, (Google is no longer allowed in China) and Microsoft comply with this condition of operating there. While the leadership of these companies regularly express their distaste for China's Great Firewall policies, in the same vein they consider it a necessary part of doing business in China and better than the alternative, which would be to not have any China business at all. Jerry Yang, a founder of Yahoo!, additionally has implied that the presence of foreign internet companies in China will eventually help bring about less internet restriction in China.

Reaction of United States

United States Trade Representative's (USTR's) “ National Trade Estimate Report ” in 2016 referred the China’s digital Great Firewall: "China's filtering of cross-border Internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers." Claude Barfield, the American Enterprise Institute's expert of International trade, suggested that American government should bring a case against the Firewall, a huge trade barrier, in the World Trade Organization in January 2017.

See also

• Fang Binxing, considered to be the Father of China's Great Firewall
• Bamboo Curtain
• Berlin Wall
• Great Cannon — A distributed denial-of-service attack tool co-located with the Great Firewall.
• GreatFire — An organization monitoring the Great Firewall.