It is a known fact that the internet is an essential resource in the 21st century. Across the globe, the public uses the internet for information, entertainment, business, and as a platform to express themselves. The internet should be a free domain for the public to use but in countries such as China, that is not the case. The Chinese have been practicing censorship even before the internet was around. The censorship began with books and any new publications had to go through a government lead process to be published. The public had limited access to any books outside of China, as the government did not want anti-communist ideas to be public information. This censorship process has only transitioned and adapted to the invention and mass use of the internet. In current years, to even gain access the internet requires a long and tedious process that requires multiple forms of personal information (Barme). Government workers work full time to monitor and track searches and websites. Certain terms or phrases are blocked from being searched, and international websites are made restricted from access. Any antigovernment post/websites are removed and those responsible can be prosecuted (Rife). China uses this mass censorship known as, “The Great Fire Wall”, to restrict the public’s access to information and its ability of expression and by doing so completely disregards the freedom of speech. The Government says the Fire wall is to protect their citizens but instead it is limiting and denying them of their human rights.

It is important to understand how “The Great Fire Wall” works to see how much effort the Chinese government has put into censoring its online users. Starting in 1996 China began to block websites from public use such as human rights pages and western news sites (The Economist). In 1999, Fang Binxing, known in china as the father of the great fire wall, started to work on creating an online filtering technology that targeted keywords and phrases in order find posts and websites to censors. Today, Multiple agencies are in charge for different platforms of censorships, whether it be press, print, or online. The main supervisor and watcher of online monitoring is the propaganda department, which in the past few years has hired over 2 million “public opinion analysts” whose jobs are to sift through social media and forums for antigovernment messages (Hunt). That doesn’t even include the government workers who design restrictions and block hundreds of websites a day. New websites are constantly being made and hackers battle daily to get through censorships and so the government puts massive amounts of money towards improving the firewall. Since the government does not disclose most of its budget it is hard to estimate how much money goes into government censorship but it was disclosed that the Internet Propaganda office invested 4.3 million into their department (The Economist). This Chart by The Economist lays out how these departments censor online searches and posts (The Economist). 

China contains the largest online population in the world. Over 649 million internet users log on every day to conduct business, gain information, for entertainment, but every restriction put online affects a huge portion of their citizens (McKirdy). The process to gain internet access is elaborate and a pain. It requires citizens to fill out multiple forms, ones that must be filled with their personal information and others making users promise not to look up controversial topics and to not speak against the communist government (McKirdy). Once online users are limited to only information allowed by the government. China blocks international sites such as news sites and so citizens are almost blind to the outside world of their censorship bubble(cite). The citizens of China should not be subject to that kind of isolation. They are restricted from expressing any negative opinions about their government and so any political voices from the public are silenced(cite). Even websites such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked since it is possible to bad mouth the government through tweets or posts. In some cases, citizens have even been sentenced to jail for expressing their negative views on the government. The Chinese government says they built the firewall to combat internet porn, illegal trades, and unlawful information, but what has happened are innocent arrests for peaceful online protests (Rife). In 2014, Ilham Tohti, an economics professor, who used his website “Uyghur Online” to try to unite ethnic communities was arrested for his post against the government policies, and sentenced to life in prison for separatism (Rife). That is just one of the hundreds of men and women prosecuted for expressing what they believe and it the biggest suppression of the freedom of expression in China in the past decade (Rife). 

 The rest of the world with unlimited access to the internet is looking at China from the outside in. Of course, the rest of the free world sees that change must be made, but does most the Chinese public view it in the same light. For most of the public the firewall has become a part of their life that they have chosen to accept it. In a recent Ted Talk, Michael Anti, a major Chinese blogger and journalist, spoke on his experience on living within the wall. Michael describes the internet as two parts, the internet and the china net, the china net being basically China’s own version of the internet due to fire wall. Within in this “China net” the public has begun to create their own versions of major social media platforms like Facebook, known as Renren (Anti). The Chinese public is battling the censorship by creating their own versions of websites they are restricted from, and these website clones are making the government’s job even harder (Anti). 

Chinese censorship not only has an internal impact but also an external impact on the rest of the world. The Chinese Fire wall has taken away one of the largest online markets from most of the world. In April of 2016 the United States labeled the Fire Wall as a barrier to trade, since eight of the most heavily trafficked sites were blocked by the wall (Deyner). Businesses such as Apple reported that they have only received a negative impact after investing in a Chinese market only after 6 months (Deyner). Google and YouTube have both been blocked from Chinese use after controversial events have happened like the unrest in Tibet in 2008 (Deyner).

The Chinese government also blocked twitter and Facebbok after a major train crash lead to multiple deaths in 2011 (Deyner). Google decided to remove its search engines and pull out of the Chinese market after 2010 when it was internally attacked by Chinese censorship workers and even had multiple Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists hacked (Waddell). This isn’t the first time the Chinese have attacked foreign companies and websites. There is recent news of the Chinese government using a new cyber weapon called the “Great Cannon” to flood international websites with malware and spam in order to shut down the sites(Perlroth). In spring of 2015, China started to use this cannon to flood American sites that allowed Chinese citizens to view the materials that were censored (Perlroth). The Chinese government says that this technology is to block advertising and web traffic for their search engine Baidu, but that isn’t the case. The Chinese government has also recruited hackers to attack and receive information from Western companies and agencies (The Economist). They use the Great Wall as a shield from being traced as they attack government agencies and businesses (The Economist). These should be seen as attacks on U.S property and should not be tolerated.

Pushing foreign online competitors out of China, is the advantage the government gets with the establishment of the Great Fire wall. The government uses their filtering and blocking to make western companies websites nearly impossible to reach. The fact that China contains the largest online economy, and largest base of online users makes an even bigger loss to any company trying to gain foothold in the market. Due to the firewall forcing foreign businesses out, the government now has control of reliable, home based companies to lead its online market. In a country where most of the web’s information is blocked, citizens spend their online time for entertainment and shopping which allows the online market to thrive even more. The problem is that with foreign competitions out, Chinese companies are making their own versions of western companies, and this is turn is closing off China even more from the rest of the world since the public does not need to rely on outside markets for their needs (The Economist). A closed off country will go stagnant after a while. What China is basically doing is Isolationism, the government has created its own world due to the Fire Wall. The censorship will only curb innovation, companies can not thrive in a closed market. There are over 10,000 company start ups a day but with the only customers being those in China, the success rate is too low (Bao). New entreprenuers don’t know the new trends due to being censored from international news. Succeessful business owners argue that international intereference would only make the market more crowded and hurt the public. China needs to realize that by closing themselves off, they will only hurt themselves in the long run.

 This curbing of human rights is not just a problem in China, but in other non-democratic countries such as Saudi Arabia and North Korea (Taibi). While China may be at the bottom of the world list for internet freedom but it only ranks eighth in the most censored countries of the world. Censorship effects more than just online traffic, in Eretria and North Korea any form of opposition towards the government is punishable by years of imprisonment. China is not far off from breaking the top five censored countries. New technology and research may lead to an even stricter fire wall and greater advancements in surveillance technology to be used on monitoring of online usage (Perloth). China has steadily ranked third in the most imprisonments of journalists for over a decade, and these advancements will only lead to more (CPJ). These innovations will only worsen the state China’s internet is already in. Increased surveillance and monitoring completely breaches a citizen’s privacy and forces them to comply and browse the web in fear. The public is forced to use the web knowing that a government worker is monitoring their posts and search history.

There have been examples of the public changing/forcing the government to make social changes because of online protest in recent years. Pan Shiyi, a micro blogger, used China’s version of twitter, Sina Weibo, to start a protest against the smog and pollution levels in China (The Economist). Millions of users tweeted in outrage against the smog that had come to blanket Bejing and other Chinese cities, this online riot lead to the tightening on pollution restrictions and government plan to clean the air (The Economist). The reason the public was so outraged was because the online censorship had blocked all negative reports of the air pollution. The censorship denied the public from knowing that the air they breathe every day was detrimental to their health. By blocking news and information from the public the Chinese government risks hurting their own citizens. The scary thing is since China can block news from their citizens, it also has the ability block any internal news from leaving. This gives the government the ability to conceal any news that would otherwise bring international attention to them. This actually occurred in summer of 2009.

In July 2009, after ethnically charged riots left hundreds dead in Xinjiang, a remote north-western region with a sizeable Muslim Uighur minority, the authorities put the province on electronic lockdown. More than 6m internet users were cut off from the rest of China and from the world, and long-distance calls and text messages on mobile phones were disabled. Xinjiang residents could not use these telecoms services for many months and were unable to use any of the outside internet, even most of the scrubbed Chinese version, until the following May, leaving a gap of more than ten months (The Economist).

This should have international news but due to the Chinese government’s free censorship, the deaths of hundreds were kept secret for months. 

A solution to ending censorship is not one that will come soon or easy. There is not one answer or action that any democratic country could do to stop what China has spent decades on building and strengthening. The only way Chinese censorship will end is internally. China’s censorship may end up being its own demise. Since the Great Fire Wall has helped China to create its own China net, it has brought about copied versions of western and international sights. The biggest weapon for the public comes from these copys in the form of social media. Social media is changing the way the government has censors information, and change has already come. One example being the millions of users outraged about the air pollution which lead to government pollution control. Micro blogging is the public’s way to voice their opinion and it is seen due to the government workers monitoring posts. The ability to rapidly share information through tweets and share photos in seconds give a lot of power to the new tech savvy citizens. For now, as long as the Chinese markets are on the rise, poverty is declining, and people are happy, the government will keep control. But, this trend won’t continue forever and all it takes is one major event to stir up the public and with pollution, corruption, and food scarcity on the rise it could happen at any time (The Economist).

Censorship in authoritan governments is a policy that is outdated in world where the internet is incorporated in most aspects of life. In this era, restrictions on the internet will only detrimental to the user as they are limited from the usefulness of the internet. That is why China’s policy is a violation to human rights. The citizens who try to speak are silenced and forced to live in a country that is separating itself from a world where people have the freedom of speech. The Spotlight is on China because it is not yet completely shut off from the world like North Korea or Eretria, but it is headed in that direction. The country’s Great Fire Wall is a double edged sword because while it keeps any information that would affect the government secret, it also creates bubble that separates them from the rest of the world. That bubble will pop eventually because that trend of good times will only last so long and the millions of citizens that have become accustomed to the way of life will see just how much has been hidden behind error screens.
