Non-Fiction

The Great Firewall of China — web of control

James Griffiths takes a timely look at the world’s most sophisticated censorship system

© New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

Yuan Yang MARCH 12 2019

History can be erased in a matter of keystrokes. As I was sitting down to write this
review, a message flashed across my screen from a well-known Chinese data analysis
expert, announcing he was about to delete all of his Twitter posts. “It is not my
intention to subvert state or Party authority,” he wrote.

The previous month, he had published a data analysis of government officials’

plagiarised academic work. Now, not only are his tweets gone but also his volumes of
code on GitHub, a Microsoft-owned code-sharing platform. Over the past year,
Beijing’s censors have for the first time tried to scrub Twitter of posts that they find
unpalatable, hacking into dissidents’ accounts and forcing some to delete their own
content. That is all despite the fact that Twitter is already blocked in China.

China has been mounting a concerted attack on freedom of speech online for over two
decades. For most non-Chinese contact with Beijing’s censorship controls, typically
occurred, if at all, on trips to the country where lack of access to Google or Facebook is
a routine and frustrating experience. But in recent years China’s attacks on internet
freedoms have expanded beyond its borders, as the Hong Kong-based journalist
James Griffiths writes in The Great Firewall of China.

Chinese state-sponsored hackers, he writes, have temporarily brought down GitHub,

extensively phished Tibetans in India, and according to US indictments allegedly
stolen business secrets from American companies. Moreover, China has lobbied for its
vision of cyber sovereignty and a walled internet internationally and helped Russia as
well as Uganda build its internet controls. Those concerned about digital rights in the
west would do well to heed Griffiths’ warnings that China’s system of internet
censorship is not for internal consumption only but is being exported as part of a
campaign by Beijing to legitimise its approach to the world.

China learnt from the best to build its firewall: US tech companies, such as Cisco, that
had developed basic internet traffic-filtering tools that gave corporations control over
their employees’ browsing. But Beijing took these tools to a new level and scale, and
today operates the world’s most sophisticated censorship and surveillance system. To
stop people from connecting to websites or services the Communist party does not
like, the Great Firewall blocks website names, misdirects traffic and can even shut off
encrypted communications by figuring out to what kind of service the user is trying to
connect.
This book comes at a time when governments around the world are worrying over
China’s expanding technological capabilities and its ability to conduct cyber
espionage. Griffiths explains a technical subject — Beijing’s internet controls —
through the lens of Chinese politics and the logic of social movements. Chapters on
tech companies and regulation are interleaved with deeply moving stories of the
accidental activists who became the victims of China’s censors: Falun Gong mystics,
satirical cartoonists and Uighur Muslims, among many.

As he delivers an expansive history of the Chinese internet, Griffiths bundles various

theses, the first of which is that the internet threatens China’s rulers not because “it
risked undermining their control over information, but because it threatened to create
a platform for organising against them”. Using this framing, one can much better
understand the decisions of Beijing’s censors.

It illustrates why, for example, regulators tolerate complaints over air pollution and
disgraced politicians, but last year closed down a video-sharing platform that was
almost entirely populated by lewd jokes, called Neihan Duanzi (“Implicit Stories”).
One sample sketch runs: “My father told me that I couldn’t date this girl because he’d

been unfaithful and she was actually my half-sister. But my mother reassured me it
was OK — he wasn’t my real father.”
Young-to-middle-aged urban men were so dedicated to sharing such jokes that they
formed fan groups to meet offline en masse, with the social bonding habits, such as
coded greetings, of a fraternity. Long after the ban, one could still find bumper
stickers advertising the platform (none of which appear to be officially issued by its
maker, ByteDance) in the nightlife district of Beijing.

The over-reaching ambition of Beijing’s

censors has been cause for some in the west
US groups’ desire to stay on
to expect China’s internet controls would
the right side of the ruling
become ever looser, due to a sheer inability to
party has conflicted with
control a flood of information. The opposite
the need to protect users
has happened: China’s technological ability to
control the internet at home, and attack tech
platforms abroad, has grown. Even in the half
year since the book was finalised, so much has happened — espionage allegations
against telecoms giant Huawei; the exposure by the news outlet the Intercept of
Google’s attempts to re-enter China; the attacks on Twitter users — that several new
chapters could be added.

Nor has China’s internet been opened up by western social-media platforms, as some
had hoped. Despite the best efforts of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who famously
asked President Xi Jinping to name his first child, any progress appears to have been
halted by a trade war with the US and personnel moves at the head of the Cyberspace
Administration of China that saw the removal of a top official judged sympathetic to
American tech interests.

The history of US tech companies in China means that one cannot take the “western
liberator” model for granted, Griffiths argues. Companies’ profit motive and desire to
stay on the right side of the Communist party has conflicted with the need to protect
users. In the early 1990s, Cisco started selling internet surveillance gear to China. In
2004 Yahoo handed over email data that led to the jailing of a Chinese journalist. The
following year, Microsoft deleted the blog of a famous dissident.

In a slightly rushed epilogue, Griffiths concludes that the capitalists of “Silicon Valley
won’t save you”, but nor can western governments (sometimes hypocritically)
propounding the virtues of a free internet abroad, given the suspicion that
governments such as China’s attach to anything the US defends. Instead, what we
need is a “user controlled, transparent and democratic internet”, Griffiths concludes.
Writing this in Beijing, struggling to send even this review outside the Firewall, I lose
sight of what that looks like.

The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative

Version of the Internet, by James Griffiths, Zed Books, RRP£20, 385 pages

Yuan Yang is the FT’s Beijing correspondent

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