The Myth of Internet Freedom: Chinese censors and Western tech giants have more in common than you think.

AuthorMcDonald, Cassidy

The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternate Version of the Internet

by James Griffiths

Zed Books, 288 pp.

In July 2016, after a Hague tribunal ruled against China's claims to land in the South China Sea, Chinese protestors unfurled a red banner in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the northern province of Hebei. They viewed the chicken chain as a proxy for American hegemony. "What you eat is KFC," the banner read. "What is lost is the face of our ancestors."

The protest was patriotic, but in the eyes of the Chinese government, it was still a protest. Party leaders moved swiftly to try to stop any further organizing around the issue. The name "KFC" was censored online, and the state-run Xinhua news service published an article decrying this sort of "emotional release" as a threat to the normal order of society.

On the surface, the Chinese government's dampdown on a pro-China protest was counterintuitive. But, as James Griffiths explains in The Great Firewall of China, China's censorship machine is not as straightforward as we might believe. Chinese internet control does not aim strictly to limit anti-China or anti-Communist Party speech. Rather, it seeks to prevent the formation of any community that could, in theory, threaten the country's stability and its leaders' authority.

Griffiths, a CNN reporter based in Hong Kong, shows that the story of China's internet strategy is, at its heart, the story of the Communist Party's quest to stay in power. He tracks the history of China's censorship mechanisms and explains both the technical and political methods Beijing has used to control its online spaces for the past three decades, defying the predictions of Western spectators. Bill Clinton, for example, famously declared that China's efforts to censor the internet were akin to nailing "Jell-0 to the wall." In the end, China has proved that nailing Jell-0 to the wall may not be such a hard task at all.

Griffiths tells the story of China's firewall through the lens of the minority groups and activists who continuously storm its perimeters. The country's internet has been censored almost since its inception, but regulators developed many of the firewall's original techniques in order to quiet the spiritual movement Falun Gong. In 1999, when adherents campaigned for more favorable news coverage, the government drastically censored any Falun Gong-related material (and arrested thousands of practicing members). A 2003 study...

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