The use of censorship in media has always been used to protect an audience from material that may be deemed unsuitable for the public eye such as, nudity, profanity, and gore. In most democratic countries, there is always the choice to view the uncensored versions of media. The problem is that in some non-democratic countries there is no choice. The governments of these authoritarian or communist countries control what information and media the public can view.  For the past 20 years, the communist power of China has been censoring the public’s use of the internet and media (Taubman). In 1998 the Chinese government began the “Golden shield Project” or more popularly known as “The Great Fire Wall”, which is an online gate way that allows the government to control what the public can search and view online (The Economist). The Great Fire Wall has grown and adapted in order control the mass use of the internet in China. 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 to restrict the public’s access to information and its ability of online expression and by doing so completely disregards their freedom of speech.

It is important to understand how “The Great Fire Wall” works in order to understand how much effort the Chinese government is putting into censoring 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). The two million does not even include the government workers who engineer codes and proxies that block hundreds of websites a day. With new websites constantly being created and hackers battling daily to get through the firewall, the government invests 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 leaked that the Internet Propaganda office invested 4.3 million into their department (The Economist). Millions of dollars are being used to fund the suppression of online freedom and expression. 

With the largest online population in the world, Chinese censorship laws put a strain on millions of online users every day. Over 649 million internet users log on every day to conduct business, gain information, for entertainment, but every online restriction affects a huge portion of their citizens (McKirdy). The process to gain internet access is elaborate and time consuming. Online access requires citizens to fill out multiple information forms that require personal information and that require users to legally agree 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 news and media sites so citizens are almost blind to the outside world of their censorship bubble (The Economist). 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 (Taibi). Even websites such as Facebook and Twitter have been blocked since it is possible to bad mouth the government through tweets or posts (Deyner). In some cases, citizens have even been sentenced to jail for expressing their negative views on the government. The Chinese government stated that the purpose for building the firewall was 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 countries with free access to the internet can only perceive life in China from the outside of the firewall and do not understand what life inside the wall is like . Of course, most democratic countries see that change must be made, but does the majority of the Chinese public want change? For most of the public the firewall has become a part of their life that they have chosen to accept. 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 Facebook after a major train crash lead to multiple deaths in 2011, and the government did not want the public to discuss the incident (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 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 attempts to restrict American online activity are 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 practicing is Isolationism (a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups), and 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 startups a day but with the only customers being those in China, the success rate is too low (Bao). New entrepreneurs are blind to new trends due to being censored from international news. Successful business owners argue that international interference would only make the market more crowded and hurt the public (Bao). 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 an online protest about the unsafe smog and pollution levels in China (The Economist). Millions of users tweeted in outrage against the smog that had come to blanket Beijing 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 occurred in summer of 2009.

In July 2009, after ethnically charged riots left hundreds of citizens 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 inhumane incident should have made international news but, because of the Chinese government’s extreme 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 copies in the form of social media. Social media is changing the way the government censors information. 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. As long as the Chinese markets are on the rise, the poverty rate is declining, and people are happy, the government will keep control. This trend won’t continue forever, all it takes is one major incident 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 authoritarian 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 a trend of prosperity 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.
