The Chinese Internet: Control through the layers

Abstract

China is often described as having the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime.1 It garners much fear and attention in the media and among policymakers, yet most reports focus on specific incidents or capabilities, not the system as a whole. The Great Firewall, which generally refers to the technical implementation of controls, is the most well- known part of the system, but the overall control regime includes a significant human element ranging from police persecution of dissidents to human censors who review individual blog and social media posts to the self-censorship that has become an almost reflexive response among citizens. The control regime implemented by China is in many ways exactly what one would expect of a rational, forward-looking, planning-oriented authoritarian regime determined to remain in power while retaining legitimacy: extensive, pervasive, deeply integrated into the technical apparatus of the Internet, and both reflective of and entwined with the political and social structures in which it is embedded. It is not a perfect regime – not every post the government would deem undesirable is caught or removed – but it is good enough. It utilizes technical tools, self-censorship, and human review to create a system with enough built-in flexibility to enable a fine-grained control of which most political leaders around the world can only dream.