Great Firewall
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The Great Firewall of China (Chinese: 防火长城; pinyin: fanghuo changcheng) is a blanket term with ironic connotations thought to have been coined in an article in Wired magazine in 1997[1] [2] and used by international, including Chinese, media to refer to legislation and projects initiated by the Chinese government (which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP) that attempt to regulate the internet in Mainland China. These CCP regulations include criminalizing certain online speech and activities, blocking from view selected websites, and filtering key words out of searches initiated from computers located in Mainland China.
History of Internet Usage in China
China did not have a cohesive system of networked computers until 1994. However, internet use in China grew extremely rapidly; while in 1997 there were only 250,000 people online in China, by 1999 that number had grown to 3.5 million. By 2004, there were 80 million users, and as of 2007 there were 162 million users, ranking China just behind the United States (210 million users) in number of people online. However, these numbers should also be framed in the fact that given their respective populations, only 12% of Chinese people are online whereas in the United States, 70% of the population is connected to the internet.
Origins of Chinese Internet Law
While the United States and several other western countries passed laws criminalizing computer crimes beginning in the 1970's, 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" (Chinese: 计算机犯罪; pinyin: jisuanji fanzui), which it divided into two categories: crimes that target computer networks and crimes carried out over computer networks.[3] Many Chinese judges were critical of CL97, calling it ineffective and unenforcable. 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 CL97, the PRC's State Council and its local ministries are allowed to define "cyber crime" themselves, and their definitions are not required to go through the NPC legislative process. As a result, the CCP has ended up relying heavily on regulation at the local level to carry out CL97.
Great Firewall
Two broadly defined online activities punishable under CL97 are used as justification for perpetuation of the Great Firewall. These actions include using the internet to distribute information considered "harmful to national security," and using the internet to disseminate information considered "harmful to public order, social stability, and Chinese morality." Again, it is left up to state regulators to determine what types of online behavior and speech fall under these categories, and review by the NPC is not required for those regulators to bring charges against and convict individuals.
As part of the Great Firewall, beginning in 1993 China started the Golden Shield Project (Chinese: 金盾工程; pinyin: jindun gongcheng), 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. The main operating activities of the Golden Shield gatekeepers include monitoring domestic websites and email and searching for politically sensitive language and calls to protest. However, by late 2007 the Golden Shield Project proved to operate haphazardly at best, as individuals have adapted by using proxy servers, among other strategies, to circumnavigate to the blocked content.[4]
Moreover, some research evidence has indicated that suspicion of the "Great Firewall" in China and the sense that one is being surveyed online leads to chilled speech and self-censorship, which has been more effective at blocking internet content than any Chinese project or law has been.[5]
Effectiveness of Great Firewall
The CCP has had some success in filtering key words out of internet searches and blocking access to selected sites. For example, web sites for The New York Times and Washington Post were for the lay user inaccessible in Mainland China until 2002.
Internet cafes as of 200x were required to register every customer in a log when they used the internet there.
Yahoo, Google, AOL
Administration of Great Firewall
Cisco