An Inside Look at the Great Firewall of China

alphadogg writes "An interview with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, who has experienced 'The Great Firewall of China' firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship. One good thing to know: With VPNs and proxies, you can get around it pretty easily." Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?

Just more corporate pandering...

But, eventually, corporate pandering will lead to greater economic freedom for the Chinese, and then, ultimately, greater political freedom.

I don't mean to sound elitist, but most Chinese people in the USA that I have talked to have basically said that yes, while more human rights and freedom of speech would be nice, the problem is that the Chinese peasant class is so uneducated and so poor that there is a huge risk of total social chaos if China adopts the Glasnost route. They want to avoid a Soviet - collapse style meltdown.

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Convincing the people that the government is the only thing standing between them and chaos is a classic tactic of totalitarian governments. (Now think about what the American government is currently doing....)

However, given China's recent history, I'm not

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Actually, Russia has lately been sliding back into old Soviet ways recently. Putin is ex-KGB, and his hand-picked successor recently became president. Most media outlets are very fearful of criticizing the government. I wouldn't exactly point to Russia

Re:Just more corporate pandering...

No, no no. If all you want is for the CCP government to go down, then certainly that is what would work the fastest. However, the chaotic situation that would arise would be an economic disaster taking away the wealth gained by normal Chinese. It is a popular misconception in the West that the CCP is incompetent and corrupt and only exists for the sake of party members, but the fact is that even in a one-party state there is politics, and there is discussion and debate, and the system works. It's authoritarian, sure, and it's a mistake not to allow freer public discussion (even with such, I believe the government would still have great support of the people), but the system is not tyrannic, and while far from as democratic as Western democracies we must remember that there are differences between Western democracies, notably with a trainwreck of a two-party plutocratic system in the USA. The Chinese government has done a lot more good for the environment than the US government has, for example, with limits on car emissions that would be impossible for the US to meet, and energy efficiency markings for electronics. Would Americans not be offended if Swiss people claimed that the American political system needed to collapse? Anyway, you're very uninformed about the current state of the world economy if you believe that the West could cause the Chinese economy to collapse without taking an enourmous hit itself.

Reading posts like this, and seeing hundreds of Chinese protest outside Tous Les Jours, a bakery chain here in Beijing, because they thought it was French (hint: it's Korean!) just makes me wonder how diplomacy between different countries ever works. It's all a bunch of chauvinistic cheerleading for whatever country you happened to be born in, with stretching of and invention of facts and a complete disregard of the views of the other part. Chinese people know they don't have a proper democracy. They don't mind this fact as much as Westerners want them to. Now I'll go back to try to convince Chinese people of the benefits of Western democracy and that the Western media is not a single-faceted entity/hate machine directed at discrediting China, but in fact allows for having several different opinions...

Back on the subject of the Great Firewall, I'm posting from behind it, and I don't know any internet user here who does NOT know how to activate a proxy of some sort for the sites that aren't available.

Re:Just more corporate pandering...

The various stages don't have to happen in the same order. The U.S.A. is definitely entering a fascist stage. Overextended empire, Homeland Security, warrantless wiretaps, obedient, self-censoring media, torture -- these are all signs of a fascist takeover.

See the Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism [rense.com]. The U.S. is showing all of the symptoms. Beware of 6 and 14: these are key to making all of the others possible.

CORPORATE pandering?

Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?

Ask the international Olypmic commitee what they were thinking. The companies that make money off of the broadcasting and related licensing are going to make money regardless of where the games are held. It would likely be a lot easier, logistically, NOT to have to put up with the Chinese nonsense while moving the media army into place to cover the games. Which corporations are being pandered to, here? The corporation that is China? They (the Chinese) promised all sorts of open access and press freedom as part of the package they pitched while trying to seduce the panel that chooses the venues. They were obviously lying, a lot. How that broadly strokes "corporate" interests enough to refer to it that way in the summary is not clear enough in the summary to warrant that particular bit of editorial spin.

Re:CORPORATE pandering?

Just about everything we purchase now is produced in China. Sure it would hurt China a lot of a country were to boycott them. But it would also hurt their own citizens. Not only would consumers be unable to purchase products from China, but businesses would be unable to outsource labour to China in order to keep prices low. While I think China needs to change their ways, I don't know if boycotting Chinese products is really feasible from an economic standpoint.

Re:CORPORATE pandering?

ll three are self-serving, but the Chinese government are the most socially responsible of the lot.

I see. That would be the China that just shouted down any attempt by the UN to even hold discussions about whether to try to bypass the Burma junta and get international aid directly to the million people that are about to die there? That IS socially responsible!

And corporations? They exist to serve the people that form and invest in them. That's their actual purpose. Of course, many of them are lining up to provide goods and services to aid the people who are about to die in Burma, while China and Russia are backing the junta's demands to funnel all of the aid through them (you know, the people who elected not to warn their coastal population that they were about to die in droves, even though the rest of the world scrambled to let that military regime know what was about to happen). You know, the military regime that is confiscating such aid as IS allowed to land there, and which they are labeling with their own stickers and political propoganda before handing it out. You know, the military regime that China is insulating from so much as a formal rebuke from the UN.

What's your motivation, here, exactly? You find the Chinese government - who jail and even kill people for saying the sorts of things you can sit at a US corporate desk and say all day long, and who harbor and sanction outright network vandalism and malware propogation around the world, and prop up hell holes like North Korea - more trustworthy than Honda, or Bayer, or LG, or Nokia, or Virgin Atlantic, or AMD, or your local grocery store chain? Really?

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I dunno, the Chinese government doesn't strike me as being particularly socially responsible. They may do their best to maintain order and stop various "vices", but their environmental record totally stinks. That they apparently couldn't give a rat's ass a

Great Firewall - hackneyed cliche

The "Great Firewall of China" was a neato headline when Wired did it over 10 years ago.

Little Known Fact

Little known fact is that the Great Firewall of China is the only slap in the face to freedom that can be seen from outer space.

Why would the Olympics lead to a freer China?

What does an athletic competition have to do with the internal politics of a country?

At the risk of running afoul of Godwin's law, Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics before the beginning of WWII. They mostly used it as a propaganda opportunity, and it's hard to say that the event led to any more openness or political moderation on the part of the German government.

What kind of stupid question is this?

Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?

Since when has any Olympic games, even the ancient ones, ever led to to resolution of any conflict? Did the 1936 Summer Olympics get Hitler to mend his ways? Did the 1980 Moscow Olympics get the Soviet Union to mend their ways? Did any of the Olympics held in the US do anything but promote self-importance and exceptionalism amongst Americans? Did the Tokyo Olympics, or the Nagano Olympics get Japan to mend fences with China and Korea over Japanese war crimes in WW2?

At the very best, it allows rival groups to fight each other in a less murderous way for a bit (and even that isn't a given, see Munich 1972, Atlanta bombing). That's a good thing, but expecting more than that is ignoring history. The people in the "Olympic movement" that see the games as a tool for peace and understanding are just deluding themselves. Even with the ancient games, wars were only put on hold, not ended, and that was only because it was a religious event.

The only people that ever make money on an Olympics are the ad agencies.

Re:What kind of stupid question is this?

As Americans, we look at China and say "well why don't they want freedom?" The reality is that they don't even have a concept of what our type of freedom is, for them it's probably something to be feared because that's what they have been told. But the more that the people are exposed to the western world the more they may realize what it is that they are missing out on

Um, No.

First, the Olympics won't do much except to bring a bunch of well-fed non-Chinese speaking tourists to Beijing. These are only unlike well-fed Chinese-speaking tourists in the sense that they, well, won't speak Chinese.

China has a large middle class and a lot of rich idiots. The only difference is that there are a lot more poor folks in China than there are of the first two, which brings those "average income" numbers down. It's not like this will be the first chance Beijingren will have to see someone who hasn't skipped a meal recently.

Second, and I have to be very measured in what I say here, you need to understand something about the "cultural DNA" of China. The West, especially the US, is a very individualistic society. We will put up with a certain quantity of crime, homelessness, etc. as a consequence of this individualism. This isn't a "god damn America" indictment. It's a deal we've all made with each other. We like our personal freedoms, and have decided to accept a certain level of the bad in order to get the good. What tinkering is done with our social safety net is done with this background.

Chinese society comes from a more collectivist background. This does not mean that Chinese like repression, or will always reflexively listen to elders and betters. However, it does mean that there is an expectation that the state will provide public order. In short, in the interest of maintaining a well-ordered society, you can give up a little individual freedom.

Many of my in-laws from Taiwan (a free, democratic, thoroughgoingly capitalist Chinese society) find American culture to be strange and alien. The big houses and the lawns are nice, as is the open space and clean air, but what's up with all these people staggering around downtown drunk and drugged out of their mind with nowhere to sleep? Don't they have family to take care of them or something? Why on earth do they allow anyone to go to a store and buy a gun? Doesn't that encourage criminals? Isn't someone going to write a law to stop this?

Even when I talk to people in China (who have some incomplete knowledge of what the US is like), you get some interesting discussions about how the world should be put together.

Chinese taxi driver: "American houses are very big, and you have lots of land with them. That must be really nice."

Me: "Yes, but the other side of that is that it's not very convenient. You need a car to go to the market, or to visit friends, or to go out to eat."

Driver: "So you can't just walk to all of those things?"

Me: "No. They're often several kilometers away."

Driver: "Oh, that's no good at all. I wouldn't like that a bit."

Assuming that life in the USA is the apogee of human civilization and that all societies will inherently want to move in that direction as quickly as possible displays ignorance at best and arrogance at worst. Get out and see a bit of how things are put together elsewhere before making assumptions about what other people want.

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I do not assume that America is the "apogee of human civilization" but it is the place where i happen to live right now, and i like it.

That's good. It sucks to live somewhere you don't like.

I don't want to be mean, because it's not my style, but you reall

Re:Good luck

Well then, I guess China isn't smart enough. Proxies work great over in China; it's how I can access anything I want, watch my Netflix movies (proxy in the US, Netflix doesn't know where I really am), read the BBC, etc.

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Enter the HTTPS proxy.

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How does that bypass an IP blocklist? How does that make you immune to injected RST packets?

Magic.

Re:Good luck

Because China is trying to figure out a "balance" .... they want foreigners to be able to come in and communicate home, but don't want the general population getting too much unfiltered information.

It's about controlling the politics, not maintaing some information purity.

And, simply by blocking these sites, the government is able to mark them as bad or dangerous, which has weight with a lot of the population.... usually at least until the blocking hits too close to home. (As in all free speech issues).

Re:Good luck

Before we go crazy, it's worth reading the Pew Research Centre study into Chinese views of the internet [pewresearch.org].

80% of the population feels the internet *should* be controlled, and 85% of these believe gov.cn is the one to do it. If you follow the trends, it seems that the government's propaganda about the internet seems to be taking, in that less than a third of users said the net was a reliable source of information.

The Chinese also don't censor in the way the UAE or Singapore do either, in that you're going to get a Connection Reset error rather than a Stop! Bad Things! warning if you access something relating to the issue du jour, and they allow VPNs and proxies because 1) they know it's only a small percentage who use them and outside of this group there's little interest in bypassing the government 'safeties' and 2) most external business interests would be very very upset if their VPNs stopped working.

Re:Good luck

In an unrelated poll, 85% of Chinese feel afraid to give an honest opinion to poll-takers.

Re:Good luck

What a bunch of random bullshit! You apparently pulled a bunch of guesses based on misconceptions out of your ass, and the moderators appear to have agreed.

I've lived in China for over 3 years, using the same SSH tunnel the entire time. In addition, there are too many people in China to monitor their browsing habits. What they actually care about is what you are saying (e.g. on blogs), and then only if your words get more than a certain amount of traffic.

Enough with the misinformation. Just because you speculate that something is done because it would be the "smart" thing to do, doesn't mean it's happening.

LS

Re:Incredible

In their recent book, Who Controls the Internet, law professors Timothy Wu and Jack Goldsmith have a nice section on China. Their argument is that effective control does not require total control. Yes, it is possible for internet users in China to circumvent government controls, but as long as these controls work well enough for the average user -- who as other commentators have noted, have other concerns and priorities -- then the Chinese government has effective control. An educated Western user who has certain expectations for the internet, and who has the technical resources necessary to access proxies, can perhaps (relatively) easily bypass government controls. But that does not mean that these controls, combined with logging and fear of reprisals, are not very effective.

And, of course, China is a large market for many firms, and therefore the Chinese government has leverage to exert their influence over a set of intermediaries -- Yahoo and Google, for example -- to make their control effective (again, not perfect).

Re:A political trojan horse

I am serious- of all injustices in the world why has the Western world particularly adopted Tibet? No matter how you look at it, it's a rightful conquest. Do we expect France to come over and tell us to relinquish Puerto Rico? No- imperialist gains are imperialist gains. I don't see why China's dominion is evil while ours is not.

One suspects that if I made the same argument and replaced 'China' with 'the United States' and 'Tibet' with 'Iraq' that I'd be quickly modded troll. And since you mentioned Puerto Rico -- are we repressing an independence movement in Puerto Rico at gunpoint? Are the people of Tibet free to vote in local elections and choose their own destiny as the people of Puerto Rico are?

They revolt out of nationalistic pride, but in reality they are better off with China's modernizations.

If I made the same argument about Native Americans I'd be modded down faster then you can say "gunpowder". What the hell gives one group of people the right to impose "modernization" on another group of less well armed people? This isn't the 19th century anymore.

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I'm sorry I don't see any contradiction

You don't see a contradiction with saying that nothing justifies imperialism while simultaneously justifying it?

am merely implying that the US does not have hold over what is right and wrong- we are not the bastion nor vanguards of freedom

The notion that we can't criticize human rights failings because we ourselves aren't 100% perfect serves no one besides the oppressive re