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FINANCIAL TIMES
The Great Firewall of China — web of control
James Griffiths takes a timely look at the world’s most
sophisticated censorship system Yuan
Yang
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 to expect China’s internet controls would become ever looser,
due to a sheer inability to control a flood of information. The opposite
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 |