How The Great Firewall of China Works

The Great Firewall of China (GFW), officially known as the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程), is the system that filters, blocks and censors the flow of information online within the People’s Republic of China as sanctioned by the government to “protect” its citizens from the content it deems harmful to societal stability (or “harmony” as they call it). It’s a multi-faceted system made up of both technological and human elements which when combined together create a walled-garden version of the internet minus all the stuff the government dislikes.

Here’s a great video which explains how it works in layman’s terms:

Predictably it’s blocked in China so for folks there here’s a quick summary:

  1. IP Blocking – each computer on the internet has a unique address that the government block if they find it to host content they don’t want to be seen inside China.
  2. Keyword Filtering – the government control all the international internet gateways so can block specific pages based on keywords in their address (URL) and content which is matched against a blacklist.
  3. Self-Censorship – all internet companies operating within China are required by law to self-censor their content or face harsh penalties and possible shutdown if they don’t.
  4. Enforcement – it is estimated that approximately 30,000 Chinese “internet police” are monitoring Internet traffic and blocking content that is deemed undesirable.

With such a sophisticated system the government can block whole sites, individual pages and even specific search results on-the-fly which they can update or change based on unfolding events in the news or political climate etc. Scary stuff.

While the state prescribes broad categories of content which isn’t permissible the rules are far from clear leaving a great deal of ambiguity about what’s off-limits and without any transparency, there is no recourse for an appeal or even to get an official statement about why something may have been blocked. Companies operating within China often err on the side of caution when it comes to self-censoring their content and diligently delete anything which may bring themselves into disrepute with the government (one of the reasons why Google has exited the country).

David avatar

4 responses

  1. annoymous avatar
    annoymous

    Google left China yet.
    http://gizmodo.com/5583128/china-renews-googles-hosting-license

    Although they’re not happy, China is a large profit potential, hard decision for Google to just put down altogether.

  2. […] send my possibly-pictureless greetings from behind the great firewall of china! i have been struggling a little with the restriction of online sources and images… pretty […]

  3. blabla avatar
    blabla

    fuck the propaganda. free world, free society, free individual

  4. Great Cheap Broken Firewall (GCBF) avatar
    Great Cheap Broken Firewall (GCBF)

    my name said it all, I live in China, and even before going there I was prepared I had all kind of softwares and free VPNs ready, and I never had any problem what so ever going online. I realised that many Chinese didn’t know about these tools so I took it on myself to teach them how to use them. Now I am proud to tell you that one of the tools I used is wildly distributed via email or even qq lol all this under the stupid eyes of these 30,000 human robots internet police. Well done Chinese Government once again you show how to loose your face in front of everyone. When can you learn that by trying to protect your face, you just make yourself look even worse. Anyway, bottom line, I am just a foreigner with little resources and I can beat the system.

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