Internet censorship in China: the Great Firewall

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V.P.N.’s are popular with China’s huge expatriate community and Chinese entrepreneurs, researchers and scholars who expect to use the Internet freely. I am using one while writing these lines… But this week it’s been tough to get internet access since the Chinese government might be pushing harder because of the fortchoming China’s National Day (next October, 1st).

China, as it happened in other fields such as economy, has been rapidly increasing its internet penetration in the country. Since its first internet connections with the global computer network in 1994, China has witnessed explosive internet development, and by the end of 2008, China replaced the United States as the largest Internet user of the world. As a result of that, the growth of chinese language internet users has been exponential since year 2000, with an increase of 1,277%. And internet is usually a synonym of free access to the information, unless somebody does something to prevent it = internet censorship.

Internet censorship in China is among the most stringent in the world. China, along with another 8 countries (like Myanmar, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, etc), is censoring internet to maintain the traditional social values, to maintain political stability and to maintain national security.

Last year China’s government released a white paper defending its censoring policy. The document said the country has the right to govern the internet according to its own rules inside its borders: ”Within Chinese territory the internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty. The internet sovereignty of China should be respected and protected,” it said according to the BBC. The white paper basically mentions that Chinese government is blocking the internet because it ”wants to curb the harmful effects of illegal information on state security, public interests and children.”

China’s internet police

According to Wikipedia the size of the Internet police ”is rumored at more than 30-50,000. Critical comments appearing on Internet forums, blogs, and major portals such as Sohu and Sina usually are erased within minutes.” In 2010 about 1.3 million websites closed down in mainland China made 41 percent fewer websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier.

The Great Firewall

According to the OpenNet Initivative the ‘great firewall of China’ uses a variety of overlapping techniques for blocking content containing a wide range of material considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government. While China employs filtering techniques used by many other countries, including DNS (domain name system) tampering and IP (internet protocol) blocking, it is unique in the world for its system of Internet connections when triggered by a list of banned keywords. Known as a TCP reset, this content filtering by keyword targets content regardless of where it is hosted.

TCP reset filtering is based on inspecting the content of IP packets for keywords that would trigger blocking, either in the header or the content of the message. When a router in the Great Firewall identifies a bad keyword, it sends reset packets to both the source and destination IP addresses in the packet, breaking the connection.

The most blocked keywords in China

The most blocked keywords in China are those related to Tibetan independence, Dalai Lama, Taiwan independence, police brutality, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, pornography, some international news sources and propaganda outlets (such as Voice of America and the Chinese edition of BBC News), and certain religious movements (such as Falun Gong).

In May 2009 the most blocked keywords by Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) were the following:

• Chinese Communist Party, Ruling government
• Puppet government, One-party system
• Dictatorship, tyranny
• Human rights in China & Freedom of expression
• Gao Zhisheng (Chinese lawyer and activist)
• Falun Gong (Banned cult in China founded by Li Hongzhi)
• Keywords related to Military, Gambling, Brainwashing & Sex
• Kidney harvesting from live people, Organ Sale
• Tiananmen Square Massacre
• Tibet, Taiwan Independence
• Cheating in Examinations, Fake Diploma courses
• How to make bombs, counterfeit money and so on

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