How China Controls its Internet
A peek over the Great Firewall
I briefly visited Hong Kong in January, and a friend recommended I read James Griffiths’ The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet before I go. I’d wanted to learn about technology’s role in the 2019-2020 protests there against the newly-introduced extradition bill, widely seen as enabling the Chinese government to pursue political dissidents. I’d hoped to learn about the use of technology by both activists, who used secure messaging apps to build and sustain a “leaderless” movement, and by the government to surveil them.
I soon realized the naivete of even trying to speak with activists in Hong Kong, however. Several friends who’ve lived there warned against asking about the protests at all, describing how all their politically-engaged friends had recently left, some fearing political persecution.
And I spoke with the father of a good friend over video call who described how he and his wife had recently move away themselves. They both grew up in Hong Kong, and then left to pursue academic careers. But they returned in 1996, as Hong Kong’s political and economic climate bloomed in a more democratic, open direction. He told me how they’d intended to retire there, in the place they’d grown up, to live out the rest of their lives.
But then things changed, rapidly, beginning with the 2019 protests and then the passing of the National Security Law in 2020. My friend’s father, a professor, joined the protests early on — but as the political situation worsened, he and his wife again decided to leave the country. And this time, they don’t know if they’ll ever return.
Last week we discussed the TikTok bill proposed by the US Congress, so let’s turn our attention to learn how the Chinese government works to control the country’s internet — and by extension, its people.
I want to make clear before we begin, when I talk about “China” in these posts, I’m referring to the Chinese government — the CCP, led by Xi Jinping, the re-election of whom Amnesty International declared a “disaster for human rights.” I have many Chinese and Chinese-American friends, and I’ve spent several weeks in the country myself. Far too often a country’s darkest shadows are extended by media and politicians onto its citizens, a conflation that has time and again led to violence and discrimination against ordinary people who, through no fault of their own, come from a place with unsavory leaders. We Americans, of course, would be quite unwelcome in much of the world if all the terrible things our leaders did were projected onto us.
One day soon I’d like to write a whole post about this. Last fall, I met a Russian tech worker living in Phnom Penh, Laos, who told me she’s been a digital nomad since the start of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine. She spoke about her frustrations explaining to nearly everyone she meets that even though she’s Russian, she doesn’t support Putin. And I met others like her scattered around southeast Asia, often shy to even identify their Russian heritage.
But for now, let’s talk about China. And specifically, the Chinese government’s antagonistic relationship with the internet.
Covering the many ways in which China censors and surveils the internet is an undertaking far too big for this newsletter. I’ll be pulling from Griffiths’ book on China’s “Great Firewall” extensively, and that’s the point — he wrote a whole book on the subject! It’s highly readable though, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to dig deeper on internet censorship and surveillance in China and beyond.
But given the recent US news around TikTok, let’s try to better understand why some congresspeople came away from national security briefings “deeply troubled” about the app.
Interestingly in light of recent US news, even TikTok is banned in China. China’s citizens can use a similar app called Douyin, but can’t see whatever dance videos are going viral in the rest of the world there. And we can’t see what’s gaining ground among the youths of China, either.
I’ve seen criticism of this legislation take on at least three forms:
The TikTok bill should go further, limiting data collection by US companies, too
Congress didn’t do a good job explaining why the TikTok bill is worth passing
Fears of Chinese control don’t merit limiting the ownership of the tech we use
I largely agree with the first two points, as Senator Katie Porter discussed in a recent interview explaining why she didn’t vote for the bill. But I think (1) is infeasible anytime soon — people in the US have clamored for social media regulation for years, and we shouldn’t expect that to change until after the November election. One might question the urgency of doing this in an election year, but as we’ve seen, certain foreign governments — including Russia, China, and Iran — have repeatedly weaponized social media to interfere with US elections.
And I agree with (2), that Congress hasn’t done a good job explaining why the Chinese tech companies’ ties with the CCP are worthy of concern — which is part of why I’m writing these posts! Some in Congress agree, and are pushing to de-classify some of the national security information that “deeply troubled” them into forcing the TikTok sale in the first place.
But I disagree strongly with (3), an argument that seems something along the lines of, “Just because China, a ruthless authoritarian regime, exerts tremendous control over the internet, doesn’t mean we should do anything to stave it off — because we’re America, dammit, and we’re better than that!” I’m reminded of Michelle Obama saying “When they go low, we go high” in a speech in 2016. That was eight years ago, and said in specific regard to demeaning language — but taken in the context of today’s politics it sounds a little, well, naive.
For decades, internet fans — including myself — have viewed the internet as a force that will ultimately prevail in expanding the possibilities of human capability and flourishing, empowering the little guy to stand up to The Man. The internet has always been a place for utopian visions.
But those utopias haven’t always borne fruit. As we saw in my posts on the internet in Cuba last fall, sometimes The Man wins.
And in China, this really is the case. When it comes to internet control and censorship, in fact, China’s writing a lot of the rules — and showing others how to follow them. As a friend said recently, China doesn’t fuck around.
Today, we’ll see the many ways in which the Chinese government has built a vast web of surveillance and control over its internet. And next week, we’ll learn how the same government isn’t afraid to export those hardball capabilities to the rest of the world.
“In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem…. Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. (Chuckles.) Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.” — President Bill Clinton, March 2000
Confident as President Clinton was that it could not be done, China seemingly has learned how to “nail jello to the wall.”
China’s “Great Firewall” today consists of a vast network of technology and human censors working to ensure the internet within China — the history, news, information and communication coursing through its cables — is far more manicured and CCP-friendly than the “World Wide Web” beyond its borders. And it’s manicured in large part to ensure the ruling party stays in power, quashing any hints of dissent.
In 2008, the country employed between 30,000 and 50,000 “special internet police” — and probably many more today — “who with the aid of Western-provided technology, read private emails, conduct surveillance, remove blogs and block banned websites.”
One report even estimates the government employs over two million people (!) as “public opinion analysts,” delivering reports to government decision makers about what’s being said, where, and by whom. Topics regularly censored include a multitude of political references such as Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, Tibet, the minority Uyghur population, criticism of government leadership, and more.
And the list of blocked websites — at least occasionally, especially in times of heightened political skittishness — is long, and features many popular destinations and news sources. Among many others, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, LinkedIn, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, are always or occasionally blocked. (And to the sure upset of many, so are Pornhub and OnlyFans.)
Interestingly in light of recent US news, even TikTok is banned in China. China’s citizens can use a similar app called Douyin, but can’t see whatever dance videos are going viral in the rest of the world there. And we can’t see what’s gaining ground among the youths of China, either.
Despite these specific bans and blocks, it’s worth noting the words of James Griffiths:
“China’s censors do not care about blocking content; they care about blocking solidarity. The number one target of censorship is not the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the banned religious movement Falun Gong, or news about official corruption, it is organisation outside the Party structure. Solidarity — such as that expressed by the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989, or by the millions who took part in the Arab Spring — is the biggest threat to an authoritarian regime.”
“Flood the Zone with Shit”
Steve Bannon famously uttered those words to explain his strategy for overpowering truth and — in his view — liberal bias in American media. There is only a finite amount of time in which to consume media, and the internet provides infinite avenues for consuming it. Rather than change the narrative and tone of existing popular channels to convince people to join your side, the idea goes, it’s better to simply flood the internet “with shit.” That is, to fill the information universe with as much of your ideas as possible, whether it’s truthful or not.
And indeed, Bannon pursues this strategy with vigor, releasing at least two podcast episodes daily. We discussed this idea at length with the brilliant media scholar AJ Bauer on our podcast last year too, if you’re curious to hear more.
I usually try to avoid too much discussion of US politics in this newsletter, but I explain Bannon’s approach because of its similarity to that taken by pro-CCP forces online. As Griffiths explains:
“China’s online influence effort is sprawling, dwarfing even those of Russia and the US. This is achieved both through paid commentators, known as ‘wumao’ for the fifty cents they were reportedly paid per post in the early days, and by volunteer trolls, who are encouraged and led by state media, and usually go after overseas targets….. they generally focus on positive news, drowning out controversial topics with government-approved posts. After all, attacks on a baizuo, or ‘white leftist’, as some liberals and progressives are called on the Chinese web, can give them oxygen and attention the censors would rather they not enjoy. A 2016 study estimated that internet commenters employed by the government created around 448 million fake social media posts every year, focusing on “cheerleading” for the government rather than tussling with its critics.”
Whether in China, the US, or elsewhere, pumping out massive quantities of disinformation can be an incredibly effective strategy for spreading propaganda. It’s less important to directly combat information you dislike, in other words, than to simply drown it out.
Unfreedom of the Press
China’s government not only works to block and “flood out” information it dislikes, but also prosecutes and imprisons those spreading it. The ways in which the CCP has suppressed journalists, activists, and other critics — both within and beyond its borders — is incredibly long, but let’s explore a few prominent cases.
Reporters Without Borders ranks China 179th out of 180 — barely ahead of North Korea — in its 2023 RSF World Press Freedom Index. It also states the country is “the world's largest captor of journalists and press freedom defenders with at least 112 detained.”
China’s efforts at stamping out political dissent have especially focused on the country’s Uyghur population, a minority, largely Muslim ethnic group heavily concentrated in the western province of Xinjiang. The ways in which China has sought to control and persecute this group have been thoroughly documented, and that control has extended deep into China’s internet as well.
Griffiths discusses the case of Huang Shike, who was “arrested after forming a group on [WeChat] to discuss the Qur’an,” and “later jailed for two years for having violated laws about using the internet to discuss religion.” And he writes at length about the tragic case of Ilham Tohti, who co-founded the website Uyghur Online to bring attention to issues affecting the Uyghur population. Tohti was persistently harassed by the government since creating the site, and — in a move widely decried by internet and press freedom advocates — finally sentenced to a life in prison in 2014 under charges of “separatism.”
Individuals have even been jailed for making jokes about Xi Jinping and other top officials in private texts. And the Wall Street Journal reports at least fifty people have been sent to prison for publishing government criticism on Twitter and other social media platforms, even though most Chinese internet users can’t even view them.
A great deal of media coverage the past several years has focused on China’s Black Mirror-esque “social credit system,” feared as a panopticon of ever-present surveillance — especially of the Uyghur population — tracking nearly every action in citizens’ lives, both on- and offline. And though some point out that the social credit system may not be as comprehensive and dystopic as originally feared, the small city of Rongcheng provides a vivid illustration of how such a system can look.
As reported in MIT Technology Review:
“In 2013, the city started giving every resident a base personal credit score of 1,000 that can be influenced by their good and bad deeds. For example, in a 2016 rule that has since been overhauled, the city decided that “spreading harmful information on WeChat, forums, and blogs” meant subtracting 50 points, while “winning a national-level sports or cultural competition” meant adding 40 points. In one extreme case, one resident lost 950 points in the span of three weeks for repeatedly distributing letters online about a medical dispute.
“Such scoring systems,” the author argues, “have had very limited impact in China, since they have never been elevated to provincial or national levels.” But even if so, “No one can be 100% sure” that the national government won’t see the pilot programs of cities like Rongcheng and choose to expand them.
The author notes, hopefully, that the national government recently pushed back on local social credit policies in places like Rongcheng. But time will tell which direction this trend moves.
Circumventing the Censors
Even if all this provides overwhelming evidence of the internet being used by “The Man” to control “the little guy,” there are some glimmers of hope. The human desire to find creative ways to circumvent control can be seen throughout history, and this is so in China today, too.
Many — including John Oliver — have documented the way in which many Chinese citizens utilize a kind of wordplay to circumvent censors online. The Chinese language lends itself well to this, and internet writers can take advantage of the written script — which employs very different characters to convey similar sounds, called homonyms — to help hide meaning in seemingly disparate written words.
For instance, the word “Héxié” means “Harmony,” and is itself a euphemism for censorship — a politically-sensitive topic for online discussion . But “Héxié” in Chinese sounds an awful lot like a different word, “Héxiè,” which means something completely different: “river crab.”
The terms look different, but sound similar — and any savvy Chinese internet user can easily determine what “My blog post was attacked by a river crab last night” really means. But the term can crawl, perhaps not unlike a river crab, past the internet censors’ keyword filters and searches.
At least, it can for a while. Government censors eventually learn these workaround words, and new ones must be found. There are now hundreds of terms that have been used, and occasionally blocked, to refer to the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre online, for instance. But the workarounds work for a time.
I could write about this much, much more, but I won’t. If you’d like to read more, Rest of World cleverly illustrated examples of this, and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight discussing Chinese censorship and Xi Jinping is worth revisiting.
And unsurprisingly given everything we’ve discussed here, his show was banned in China after the episode aired.
That’s it for now. Come back next week, when we’ll look at the many ways the Chinese government has expanded this internet control to stifle dissent and influence public opinion beyond the nation’s borders.
Song of the Week: Matt Force — Sofar Sounds Hong Kong