Is China's "Great Firewall" a Fraud?

An anonymous reader notes an article up on ScienceBlogs that calls into question the efficacy of the touted "Great Firewall of China" — a program by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable. Researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico have performed experiments on the Great Firewall, sending test content to destinations inside China and observing what gets through. They conclude that the Great Firewall is more of a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users may be being watched, rather than a true firewall.

Haha had us all fooled!

[MrNaz (730548)]

That Chinese government! They like to kid. Remember Tiananmen Square? What a hoot!

Re:Haha had us all fooled!

[Chapter80 (926879)]

Interesting comparison: China says they are watching the citizens, and the citizens self-censor.

In the US, we preach freedom, and people feel they aren't being watched, and probably let their guard down. Yet our very act of patriotism, "The Patriot Act", provides unprecedented watching.

Re:Haha had us all fooled!

[baldass_newbie (136609)]

The only other difference is that China puts dissidents to death.
Here, we give them news and comedy shows.
Oh, the irony.

Re:Haha had us all fooled!

[QuickFox (311231)]

Why is this modded troll?

Not that I can read the moderator's mind, but my guess is that he believes that the poster is making light of tragedy.

Some people don't understand that humor and laughter is also a way of crying together and sharing the pain of tragedy. I automatically read the comment that way, but very likely the moderator didn't. This kind of humor is especially widespread under repressive regimes, where you can't talk explicitly about the issues. In such countries people tend to comment on things in ways that humorless secret police agents will meet with a disapproving and slightly bewildered frown, rather than a one-way ticket to the Gulag.

totally ineffective

[flyingsquid (813711)]

It's completely ineffective and a waste of resources. All the Mongolian internet users just look for a weak point and then pour through in hordes.

Not surprising.

[DaedalusHKX (660194)]

I find that "panopticon" is something unfamiliar to many western readers. This concept, however was evident in many places where totalitarian authoritarian states were to be found. This includes the North American continent which has at least 3 known authoritarian states.

However, the Great Firewall is no surprise, as it is more likely civilian self censorship and self policing that results in most "apprehensions" of dissenters the Chinese government makes yearly. Many of these people are not caught by the "technologies" or police departments, but instead are turned in by "good citizens" (otherwise known as family members and friends).

Again this comes as no surprise to me.

comon

[frakir (760204)]

I find that "panopticon" is something unfamiliar to many western readers.

Western readers just call "panopticon" in politicaly correct way.
They call it 'political correctness'.

Re:Not surprising.

[Capsaicin (412918)]

I find that "panopticon" is something unfamiliar to many western readers. This concept, however was evident in many places where totalitarian authoritarian states were to be found.

That's kind of odd really given that the concept was invented and advocated by that great champion of individual liberty Jeremy Bentham, and given that the concept has been influential in western prison design. I guess it just goes to show that not enough people read Foucault ;).

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Panopticon [wikipedia.org] was a prison design in which prisoners could at any time be under surveillance, without any way of telling whether they in fact were.

How could they monitor everyone?

[pwizard2 (920421)]

Just imagine the effort it would take to continually watch even a small percentage of the population at any given time. Not to mention, effective surveillance would require people to do the watching (not just machines) and word would get out about it, no matter how oppressive the regime.

I would compare this with the carpool lanes on USA highways.They are one of the few instances that I could think of that has signs posted every few hundred feet to warn would-be violators about the dire consequences. It basically boils down to the fact that it is impossible to effectively police the carpool lane vehicle occupant policy (due to the fact that many vehicles have tinted windows and are moving at a high rate of speed, thereby making it difficult to see inside the vehicle), so they have to try and scare people instead.

How Foucauldlian...

[by Anonymous Coward]

In communist China, YOU watch YOU!

I live in China ...

[ShanghaiBill (739463)]

I live in China. I have always been amused reading about the "Great Firewall of China" in the Western media. It really isn't that big of a deal. Very little is blocked, other than porn. Websites advocating Tibetan/Mongolian*/Xinjiang separatism, or Taiwanese independence in Chinese are blocked, but similar sites in English rarely are. The BBC is blocked, not sure why. That is about it.

Proxy lists are widely available. You can ask for one in almost any Internet cafe. So the Firewall is easy to bypass. 99.9% of people using the proxies are looking at porn.

The "Great Firewall" is actually fairly popular in China, because it means people can let their kids browse without worrying about them seeing erect penises.

* Yes, I know that Mongolia is already an independent country. But most Mongolians don't live there. 80% of them live in China.

Wikipedia is blocked, other media is blocked

[Goonie (8651)]

My home newspaper and the Wikipedia are also blocked.

And, surprisingly enough, the vast majority of Chinese people can't read English. So the existence of English-language media discussing controversial topics is largely irrelevant to all but a relatively small elite.

I also live in China

[RobertinXinyang (1001181)]

A tremendous amount of sites are blocked. Many of them are barely political at all. I can not even get to my own blog. I can post but not view. Of course, there is wikipedia; but then, there is also VOA. It is incredible, the students are tested on a standardized test using material from VOA; however, they can not go to the site. To download the mp3s of the VOA broadcasts there are back door ways of doing it; but, it is just plain stupid. It is part of the TEM4 exam.

I am not going to bother listing the NON-PORN sites that I can not access. Rest assured that I hit one of these sites almost daily. Most Chinese are not aware of the firewall, this is true, they just think that this is the way the Internet works.

Re:I live in China ...

[RazzleDazzle (442937)]

They also appear to be blocking protocols other than HTTP. I was troubleshooting SMTP connection problems with a company in China. During the transmission of the body of email from an SMTP server in China to an SMTP server in the US we were getting RSTs, this was completely reproducible. The company in China had a private link to a carrier outside of China and when they routed their outbound SMTP traffic across this link they did not have any problems delivering the mail. Switched back to their regular chinese connection and they were getting RSTs again. We never spent the time trying to narrow it down to specific content within the message body, but that might have been interesting to see what it was as the content seemed to be rather innocuous.

Having Just Been in Beijing...

[wdr1 (31310)]

... I can definitely tell you there is a firewall. Short of using a proxy (thank you ssh -D), no machine can access Wikipedia, Blogger, etc.

-Bill

As an American living in China

[LS (57954)]

I can tell you that the things in the west are very exaggerated. You can pretty much speak about anything you want here in public, as long as it doesn't cover a few hot-button topics. You can take photos and video anywhere. Many services are paid for anonymously, so there is very little tracking. And the public is aware that internet filtering is more of manifestation of a policy than the policy itself. This is very common in Chinese culture - the outward manifestation and the implicit reality being two different things. This allows for quick flexibility, whether it be bending the rules by those that obey them, or changing the rules by those that create them. You are expected to know where this implicit line lies so that you do not step on toes, even though it will never be explicitly described. It has it's positives and negatives, for example the ability to quickly override bureaucracy, but also greasing the skids of nepotism.

Anyway, the firewall is like DRM. It 'protects' the general public from seeing things they shouldn't, but it isn't really effective against anyone who knows anything.

LS

Re:As an American living in China

[fliptout (9217)]

Taiwan is a biggie. China sees Taiwan as a rogue province, and mainland Chinese people are acutely aware that the USA does not, ahem, see eye to eye with Beijing on the matter. I've traveled to Taiwan and lived in the mainland, and I frankly got sick of talking about it. They have their propaganda, the Taiwanese have theirs, and we have ours(USA). The question of independence is a matter of national pride in China and Taiwan...Basically an extension China's most recent civil war.

Nothing happened to me when I talked about Taiwan. People were curious to know what I though. I expressed myself tactfully. Usually they stfu'd after I told them I had been to Taiwan, and people there use their own laws, currency, etc etc.

Now if I had gone on national tv in china (it is ridiculously easy these days for a westerner who speaks chinese) and called for Taiwan independence, well.. Maybe I would have been asked to leave... If I was Chinese, the result might be different- jail. :P

The researchers didn't get the topology

[2Bits (167227)]

If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet

Well duh, the so-called firewall is certainly not the same firewall that everyone means, and the researchers should know better. The system was not setup to totally block/filter everything at the gate. Certain groups of users must be allowed to access all contents, regardless of political censorship at the time, this includes: foreigners living in China, certain government departments and agencies (some police departments, NSA-equivalent, CIA-equivalent, ...). For example, if you go to places where there is high concentration of foreigners living in China, especially in certain building, you can access everything, there is no blocking/filtering at all. For example, when there is any well-known, well-publicized international conference held in China, the whole block where the conference is held can have non-filtered access, especially in hotels where foreign guests are concentrated.

The system is setup to allow contents in and out, but certain routes are blocked/filtered, while others are not. That's why you see some messages passed through several routers before being blocked. If the system was setup to block/filter everything at the gate, this would not be able to achieve.

Firewall for external connections only

[fuzheado (733418)]

As someone who's written a lot about the GFW, I always remind people -- the Great Firewall only affects connections going into and out of China. For domestic traffic there is no firewall or filtering at the router level. There is another system for censorship of content on servers inside China -- good old fashioned licensing to be a "content provider" and local regulation. If you're operating inside the sovereign borders of the PRC, then there are other conventional means of controlling content, like telling your ISP to shut you down or serving your company legal notice.

So it's a fallacy to talk about the Great Firewall as the most important part of the censorship system. The majority of folks in China are looking at entertainment content on servers inside China, and not trying to lookup the latest human rights abuses on foreign servers. Similarly, Americans are more interested in Britney Spears and the latest viral YouTube video than they are researching historical abuses of Native Americans.

I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Beijing using their free Wifi (which is quite common). With all these sensitive words in the post, hope it makes it through. (Though I'm kind of tempting fate by hitting the Preview button repeatedly)

pan-op-ti-con

[mkiwi (585287)]

I had no idea what the heck this was so I looked it up. Here's the definition:

panopticon (pan opti con)
noun historical
a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from pan- [all] + Greek optikon, neuter of optikos 'optic.'

Hope this helps some one :-)

Re:It's also entirely possible...

[squidinkcalligraphy (558677)]

Actually a true filter would be way too costly and slow to work on this scale. Rather than blocking the actual connections, when a user tries to connect to a 'banned' website (or banned words/phrases are detected), the firewall sends a reset packet to both sides of the TCP connection, which effectively closes the channel. Unless of course both client and server know to ignore reset packets.

Re:It's also entirely possible...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Hi,I have been in China last fall. I was not able to access: wikipedia.*, italian online newspapers, beppegrillo.it blog and some other sites.... but I could use a vpn connection to redirect all ip traffic and verify that these sites were up and running. Even the Great Firewall was up and running. And it works quite well!

Re:Equivalent

[flyingsquid (813711)]

I was in Beijing less than a week ago, and while I was there I had tea with some Chinese scientists. I was surprised to learn (I had to be told, since I know about three words in Mandarin) that they were actually having an argument about, well, politics. I guess I'd just sort of assumed that talking about politics in China was like talking about your sex life in front of your parents, something you just didn't do. I then had an interesting discussion with a senior scientist there; she argued that Chinese socialism was the worst system of all because of all the abuses and corruption, mentioning numerous instances where Chinese scientists and officials would bill the government for personal expenses, meals, family vacations, and soforth.

I can't claim that this has given me any profound insight into how the system affects the Chinese. What I did find was striking was this- I wrote an email about this experience to a friend. And afterwards, suddenly I started to worry. Not about myself, but about the Chinese woman I'd had a discussion with. I concluded it probably wasn't a problem, since all I did was mention that we "discussed socialism" which could mean just about anything. But knowing that my communications could be watched, and that the government could potentially harm someone because of what I said... well, our conversation was one of the most interesting experiences I had while I was there, but I didn't bother to mention it in any of my other emails to friends. So for me, that was the really scary thing, not the knowledge that the government could harm me, but that it could harm the people around me if I wasn't careful about what I said. So certainly, the system seemed to be having the desired effect with me, and I'm a westerner used to free (as in consequence-free) expression, and I was just there for a week.

What I have to wonder is, what's going to happen at the Olympics? Beijing is going to be flooded with foreigners. And unlike the Tienanmen square uprising, there will be cameras- digital cameras, video cameras, cell phone cameras, news cameras- everywhere, and I don't see how the Chinese government can possibly control the flow of information. All it's going to take is a few media-savvy demonstrators who want to make a scene, and either the government will have to tolerate them (which will be bad for them) or crack down (and have everyone witness it, which will be worse). I don't know... I think they may have gotten more than they bargained with in getting the international attention of the Olympics.

Re:Equivalent

[arivanov (12034)]

Nothing new here. Soviet block was the same.

• Politics were the most popular topic for a drunken conversation around the table in the ex-Soviet Union.
• Political jokes constituted roughly 60-70% of all humour floating around. We had jokes about the fact that Brezhnev jokes cannot exist because they violate the fundamental universal constraint on the speed of light by travelling from one end of Moscow to another instantaneously.
• The situation in other ex-Warsaw block countries like Bulgaria was not any different. It went even further. Everyone was grumbling, taking the piss of the system, moaning complaining, telling political jokes. Nobody was even considering rebelling or doing something proactive against the government.
• Add to that that a lot of the literature and "formally allowed" humour like stand up comedians at the time had a lot of politics and very serious political satire inside.
  • For example on the subject of what you are mentioning - scientists taking the piss of the system - just read "Monday starts on Saturday". That is present in plenty of books from that period. "Monday starts on Saturday" and "Snail on a Slope" by the Strugatcki brothers come to mind as a perfect example.
  • Similarly people like Okudzhava, Zhvanecki, etc wrote all kinds of stuff that was taking the piss of the system and that was sang by people, shown in theatres and some of that even shown on TV.

What the "socialists" do not tolerate is open rebellion. That they squash straight away. They let the people grumble and vent steam (within limits) because if they clamp on that the chances for open rebellion increase dramatically. They do not have the resources to clamp on all of that either.

Further to this, organising something like Tian-an-Men Square or the student strikes nowdays requires money and is usually supported by foreign resource. Been there, seen that in the ex-Soviet block. Never got my hands dirty with it though (probably should have). If China does a good job of following all suitcases with money flowing into the country prior to the Olimpics they will not need to worry about any troubles.

Re:Equivalent

[fliptout (9217)]

Did you hear clicking noises on your phone while in China, too? :D

Regarding the Chinese system of business relationships, it is called guanxi. I term it a euphemism for corruption. But hey, Chinese culture is 5000 years old, or so they claim, and things do not change swiftly there.

Regarding discretion of speech, some of my chinese friends were not afraid to says "fuck the communist party" in front of other chinese. It is not a big deal anymore. Just don't say something dumb on live tv or make yourself a big target.

The government will become interested if you try to foment an insurrection and challenge their power. Small scale chit chat probably does not register a blip on their radar these days. Now that we are in the 21st century, I assume that all communication is monitored, no matter where you are. Email is sent in plain text, IM in plain text as well, etc etc.

As to the Beijing olympics... I think the government's main problem at the moment is smog. A clear blue sky is a rarity there these days, and this does not create the best impression of the city. I *loved* living in Beijing, but the air quality is terrible.

Hope you enjoyed Beijing! :)