“Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it — at least with me — they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives.“
Forget Ohio and Texas, Sen. Clinton…Want to see a “real” firewall in use? The Atlantic‘s James Fallows explains the nature and workings of China’s “Great Firewall.” “What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother…When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside? All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous mirrors that help build the Great Firewall—these and other modern achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and pre-technological reason. By making the search for external information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an environment in which familiar tools of social control come into play.”
Thanks for that link. It’s a very well written article that I think should be required reading for anyone at all interested in China in general, and Chinese internet censorship in particular.
I’ve experienced the Great Firewall personally, and when we lived in China it was a LOT easier to get news from the Swedish newspapers than it was to get the U.S. perspective. The problem we found was how inconsistent it was – a site that was blocked one day would be open the next, which made it very hard to consistently find the information you were looking for.
And we were only tangentially affected, really, nothing like how the average Chinese person is affected.