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TOC o “1-3” h z u Abstract PAGEREF _Toc536794349 h 3The historical context of the Great Firewall of China PAGEREF _Toc536794350 h 4Literature Review PAGEREF _Toc536794351 h 9The Chinese Approach to Censorship PAGEREF _Toc536794352 h 9Political Controls PAGEREF _Toc536794353 h 10Method PAGEREF _Toc536794354 h 12Limitations PAGEREF _Toc536794355 h 13Economic, cultural, societal and technological effects of the great firewall on China PAGEREF _Toc536794356 h 14Statics and experiments for bypassing the great firewall PAGEREF _Toc536794357 h 16Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc536794358 h 18Reference PAGEREF _Toc536794359 h 19
AbstractThe Great Firewall of China was created by the Golden Shield Project and is the backbone of the world’s largest censorship systems. The great firewall can monitor traffic and at the same time inject additional packets as it is an on-path system (Marczak et al. 2015). However, the wall cannot stop the in-flight packets from getting to their destinations. To achieve the ultimate goal of censorship, the wall uses three main techniques. It inspects all the internet traffic between China and the rest of the world, terminating connections that contain censored information through injecting the forged TCP reset packets on both ends. Secondly, the wall blocks the access to specific IP addresses through the gateway routers of all the Chinese ISPs and finally, it uses the DNS tampering to return the false IP addresses in response to the DNS queries to the blocked domains. Through the use of the DNA tampering, the wall affects the queries on both the foreign and domestic DNS services.
The great firewall relies primarily on the DNS tampering and the IP blocking to cut off all the access to blocked websites effectively (Feng & Guo, 2013). However, the use of such draconian methods can lead to over-censoring as well as collateral damage to the international web traffic that flows through China and other innocent websites. But despite the presence of the wall in blocking traffic, there are ways through which a user can bypass it, and this includes the use of Tor, VPNs, and Proxies, but the firewall, however, can use the deep packet inspection and the machine learning to shut down the suspected proxy and VPN tunnels and as well use an active probing system to shut down the Tor bridge relays. Presently, only a few commercial VPN services and the latest Tor protocols which use pluggable transports are viable, avoiding detection by the Great Firewall.
The historical context of the Great Firewall of ChinaThe first recorded connection in China was an email sent on September 14th of 1987 to Karlsruher Institut fur Technologie in Germany (Liu & Pan, 2017). The message, however, said that “Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner of the world” The internet arrived in China in the year 1994, and this was as an extension of the open door policy that opened the Chinese nation to the rest of the world and especially to the western world. As days passed, more and more Chinese citizens adopted the internet, and the Chinese government found themselves on the verge of losing control over the spread as well as the availability of information, and this prompted the government for action. Determined to take control and regulate the online content as well as its citizens with regard to the kind of information that would be available for them to access, the government through the Ministry of Public Security, a branch of the government that deals with access to information took action with immediate effect through the launch of the Golden Shield Project.
In the year 2000, the Golden Shield Project officially made its debut, and since then it has continuously evolved. The Golden Shield Project was initially envisioned by the government to be a comprehensive database-driven surveillance system that could access the records of every citizen and as well link together the national, regional and the local security. The rapid expansion of the internet in China rendered the goal of linking and accessing the records infeasible and therefore the project pivoted from the generalized content control at the gateway level to the individual surveillance of the users at the edge of the network. The surveillance ideology was the beginning of the great firewall as it set the footprints of what the firewall is in the present.
The Chinese censorship apparatus launched a new tool on March 16th of 2015, famously known as the Great Canon by the rest of the world (Marczak et al. 2015). The Great Canon made its grand entry through engineering a denial of service attack on the GreatFire.org, which is an organization that is mandated with the responsibility of collecting data regarding the great firewall as well as sharing the data to the rest of the world. The great firewall servers in the preceding days received up to 2.6 billion requests per hour, which is 2500 more above their normal load. Despite the Great Canon being a separate tool, it is more related in-path system as it can interfere with traffic directly through such processes such as suppression, injection, and redirection and since the time of its debut, the great canon has been used to the DDOS multiple websites and has achieved greater success.
For the past few decades, the Chinese country has experienced massive growth in the internet infrastructure, and this has enabled the Chinese citizens to continue enjoying the internet by crossing over the great wall and communicating to the rest of the world. Despite the restriction of the great wall, the Chinese authorities developed another wall, preventing its citizens from accessing information that they deemed threatening to the Chinese communist party. A set of governing interim provisions for governing computer information was set up in the year 1996, while in 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched a project known as the Golden Shield Project. The Golden Shield Project is a national filter to which is designed to block all the politically sensitive information from being availed to the domestic network.
The Great Firewall is the censorship tactic scheme and to which has been subjected to periodic changes for an upgrade since the time of its initial introduction (Wang et al. 2017). The upgrading efforts have been periodic since the people have been tireless in crossing the great firewall, with some of the people describing the interplay between the great firewall and the Chinese citizens as a series of unending prison break. The historical context of the great firewall can be divided into four stages. In stage one, the Golden Shield Project identifies and blocks the domain names and IP addresses such as Google or Facebook. The stage involved the filtration of content to ensure that sensitive information could be blocked from access by the citizens.
Figure showing how censorship is achieved.
The second stage involved the Golden Shield Project implanting the keyword censorship (Howlett, 2016). The upgrade on the keyword system was to enable detection to the contents of the websites that the people visited, regardless the internet connection was going through a proxy. In case of a sensitive content communicated through the network connection, the transmission control protocol gets to be reset. The great firewall acts as an inspector going through information, checking for the sensitive content. Virtual Private Networks has been used by the citizens in China to bypass the Great Firewall. Initially, the VPNs were used by global firms to protect their business secrets as the VPNs ensured communication transfers through a private network, with encryptions to ensure that no third party could have access to the messages.
The third stage includes the great firewall began to detect the VPNs as well as other circumvention tools. The great firewall developers with the assistance of the national government were eventually able to identify the weakness in the VPNs, and therefore they were able to detect them in the Great Firewall. Some of the commonly used features of the VPNs such as the L2TP/TPSec, IPSec and the PPTP that used specific ports were identified by the developers. During the processing of the encrypted connection, the VPNs left distinctive traces. Besides, the great firewall was upgraded to detect traces of connections that were irregular and to solve the problem, the developers from the GitHub developed the Shadowsocks, a circumvention technology similar to the VPN.
Figure showing how the Shadowsocks software works
The Shadowsocks encrypts the communication between the user and the website to which they would like to visit, but the connection is hard to detect for a third-party as the technology allows to choose various encryption methods and at the same time allocating it a random port (Fifield, 2017). Shadowsocks is an open-source project, and this implies that even if the initial developers were forced to delete the GitHub by the government, the development would still go on by other developers maintaining the variants such as the V2Ray and the ShadowsocksR.
The Chinese government has blocked more websites including the social media platforms, photo-sharing sites as well as the non-political online game sites, but the demand for circumvention tools has increased. Successful businesses that deal with the circumvention tools have been established, providing circumvention apps to the netizens who uses Shadowsocks. In the year 2014, Apple upgraded their operating system to IOS 8 and the devices were able to open the VPN-related API programming ports, enabling other developers to build privately-owned encrypted VPN apps, and since then, the proxy apps that support Shadowsocks protocols have been flourishing. The Chinese citizens need only to install and open the apps connecting to the websites that are banned by the Chinese government, and this has enabled a large number of people to access the internet outside the Great Firewall.
The fourth stage of the Great Firewall is the cybersecurity laws that target anonymity as well as the VPNs. Besides the constant upgrades on the Great Firewall, the Chinese government has introduced new laws to criminalize the VPN service providers (Clarke, 2018). The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on January 22nd 2017, announced a notice on the clearing up and regulating the internet access service market that stated that Without the telecommunication management departments’ approval, an individual must not develop on his own accord, or hire, dedicated lines that include virtual private networks VPNs or other information channels to conduct their business activities across the border. The basic telecommunication business that leased the dedicated international lines to their users were required to create a centralized user archive and make clear to the users the terms of use, as the lines were only limited to the internal office use. Besides, the lines were prohibited from connecting to domestic or overseas data centers or operations platforms to carry out business activities regarding telecommunication operations.
Literature ReviewVarious countries have different approaches to solving their problems. The great firewall is one of the solutions imposed by the Chinese government to censor sensitive content within their geographical locations. The different perspectives in solving problems depend on the policy formulated in the country either allowing or prohibiting the presence of service into their boundaries as well as how useful the services will be for the people. The government of China has a different perspective compared to other nations concerning internet censorship as most of the countries around the globe have little or no censorship at all for its users.
The Chinese Approach to CensorshipJust like other services are controlled by the government in China including the media such as the radio and television, internet as well is not an exemption as the Chinese government has the mandate of controlling the internet access and usage across its boundary. The government of China in recent days has intensified the approaches to censorship, establishing the great firewall, which has been a great achievement to the Chinese government in regulating the content of its citizens (Yang, 2016).
China has experienced rapid growth in the internet usage, and according to the results of a survey conducted by the China Internet Network Center, by the end of the year 2007, there were more than 168 million internet users, with an approximate of at least 122 million broadband internet users in China. The results indicated a close value of the number of internet users as compared to the U.S whereby 2007, the number of internet users ranged between 165 million users to 210 million. Among the most intensified category that has seen a massive increase in the number of internet users is the use of mobile phones, as the mobile phone market in China has experienced exponential growth. There are more than 440 million users of the mobile phone, with a large number of users carrying wireless phones as well as text messaging. Considering that the U.S was the first to use the internet long before China, the rate at which the Chinese citizens have adopted and used the internet has been alarming, recent indications postulating that China has overtaken the U.S regarding the total number of internet users in their countries.
Political ControlsThe Chinese government has been ambivalent towards the internet since its introduction to the country, however, the government still considers both the Information and Communication Technologies and the internet as essential components in the economic development of the nation and therefore the government has successfully and actively been in support for the online business as well as the e-government projects. The Chinese government has continued to work tirelessly towards the expansion and improvement of its ability to control the information especially the online speech and as well silence the voices that seem to be too much provocative and challenging to the status quo of the government.
President Hu in 2007, urged the government authorities to strengthen the internet controls in an interview with the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of Communist Party of China, where he stated that the ability to cope with the internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, stability of the state as well as the security of information (Gang & Bandurski, 2011). According to Hu, therefore, to ensure that the security of information is guaranteed as well as the stability of the nation, restrictions as well as censorship to the internet should be carried out. The Chinese government uses various techniques to control the flow of information through the internet. The techniques include a combination of technology and people process that include the regulations and administrative rules, technical filters as well as the internet police forces. The ultimate technique is the self-censorship from both the website users and administrators.
China has several political bodies that are involved in the control of information regarding both the development as well as monitoring within its boundaries. Some of the most important political bodies include the Central Propaganda Department that is entrusted with the mandate of ensuring that media and the cultural content follows the official standards as stipulated by both the communist party and the State Council Information Office. The Central Propaganda Department is known to be very secretive in their operations as they own no website and as well don’t share any information with the public regarding the whereabouts of their offices. The State Council Information Office, on the other hand, is an official office of the state council and has the mandate of oversight on all the websites publishing news including the official sites of the news organizations and the independent sites which post news content online. At the provincial and city level, counterpart offices have as well been established, with each one of them having an information and publicity offices that are lower level counterparts to the State Council Information Office’s national level bureau. All the offices in conjunction comprise the vast and effective network in the country that monitors the online content as well as the online information. The State Council Information Office is also mandated with the responsibility of China’s perception management to the global community.
The software and telecommunications industries are closely regulated by the Ministry of Information Industry, as the ministry is responsible for the construction as well as the management of the internet infrastructure in China (Tan et al. 1999). The body is as well mandated with the responsibility of building the surveillance and the filtering technologies, The Great Firewall. The Ministry of Public Security is responsible for the monitoring of the online content as well as using the powers of law enforcement the individuals found to violate the laws. The internet police forces, on the other hand, are entrusted with monitoring the websites that contain the illegal information and has the mandate to order the hosting service organizations to warn or shut down an offending website that consists of the information regarded as harmful and qualifies for filtration. The internet police are also responsible for the following duties that include the development of surveillance and encryption technologies in collaboration with the Ministry of Information Industry, implementation of the internet control policies as well as mentoring the online content. The internet control police are as well entrusted with the obligations of reviewing the licensing of the internet processes for the websites and the internet organizations and as well as prohibiting the non-media websites from establishing independent content obtained from the reporters.
MethodThe method of study in this research addresses the question: Since the beginning of the censorship program through the development and installation of the great firewall, what is the impact of the censorship program to the Chinese citizens and government. I made the hypothesis that the Great Firewall has been of significant benefit to the Chinese citizens and the government as it has helped in tailoring content according to the needs of the government making it easy to control the security of their nation as well as minimize harmful content from reaching the members of the public. The great firewall must have had a purpose, and the government cannot invest in a program that will not be of benefit, and therefore I believe that the great firewall must be of significant benefits. A retrospective case study is used since the expected outcome of the great firewall has already occurred. Since the initiation of the great firewall or the censorship program, there has arisen a lot of impacts with some being positive and negative to both the government and the Chinese citizens.
LimitationsThe government of China initialized the great firewall project to protect the welfare of the Chinese people. Promotion of self-made products was the main reason as the foreign products would soon invade and flood in the Chinese markets making it more of a consumption market rather than a production and export nation. Therefore, the government had to cut the links to the outside world, and this could only be achieved by the development of the great wall and as well the great firewall. The potential benefits of the great firewall have to some extent been limited due to various factors of the push and pull between the Chinese government and the Chinese citizens. Despite the efforts of the national government in developing as well as the implementation of policies that concern the censorship program, and also the internet police to monitor content on the internet, there have been challenges that have proved difficult for the full attainment of the benefits. Private companies that are determined to make a breakthrough to the access of the banned content have kept the government in toes as they keep on developing new strategies to cross over the great firewall. One of the most used strategies to bypass the great firewall is the use of virtual private networks (VPNs), and this has been the most challenging task to the Chinese government in regulating content. People still access the contents on the internet despite the tiring efforts of the government to monitor the flow of information across the internet, especially on social media.
Economic, cultural, societal and technological effects of the great firewall on China
The Chinese government has blocked a number of companies from outside China, and this has been in line with the county’s policy of blocking the Chinese population from the western ideologies especially from the United States. Such companies that have been blocked include WhatsApp, Google, and Facebook. All the efforts by the Chinese government were due to the dire need to strengthen the great firewall.
Figure showing the websites blocked by the Chinese Great Firewall.
Despite the move of blocking such a large number of sites by the Chinese government, critics argue that the move discourages creativity as well as innovation and at the same time deprives the people of China the freedom of speech and democracy. But the critics do not bar the government from implementing its policies regarding the great firewall as according to the government it is of great significance. The great firewall helps in the prevention of dissidents as well as the expensive and dangerous riots, and this is through stifling of the public outcry as well as the exposure to other better methods of living and governing (Masterson, 2015). In line to providing a better alternative, the government blocked Google, Twitter, and Facebook after the riots in Xinjiang, a Muslim based region. The idea of blocking the social media sites was to help in preserving the national security as well as political unity and therefore such incidences of riots mostly communicated through such sites will not be present in future. Through improving national security, there is as well the benefit of reducing damage caused in the process of rioting and therefore saves the country’s economy.
Despite being undemocratic, the Chinese government by blocking foreign internet companies, it protects the domestic industries as well as the companies within the boundaries of China that are possibly too weak to compete with international companies especially from the united states (Zhao, 2018). Through this, giant companies in the internet sector have been developed with the examples of the Baidu, Tencent, Weibo, and Alibaba with some of them ranking at the top 10 list of all the international websites. China has a large population, and this implies that the country has a large number of consumers that account to 47 percent of the global e-commerce sales and therefore by establishing their own companies it ensures continuity in the digital economy that grows in a healthier rate.
Statics and experiments for bypassing the great firewallIt is challenging to stay unconnected to the rest of the world through the social networks that an individual is used to such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and YouTube when visiting China. As long as one is within the Chinese boundaries, these services become unavailable as the Great Firewall takes over immediately censoring all the content that a person is checking on the internet. Life, therefore, becomes difficult without these connections. But that does not mean that a person cannot be reconnected to the sites of choice despite being in China. The great firewall uses tricks such as URL Filtering, DNS poisoning, self-censorship, manual enforcement and making it worse, blocking the VPNs. But despite their efforts, the VPNs have been a major challenge to the realization of the full potential of the great firewall as more sophisticated VPNs have continued to be developed making it hard for the government to restrict connectivity as they are unable to block some of the VPNs (Fallows, 2016).
It is very easy for a person to circumvent through the great firewall through the VPNs as an individual can an individual can anonymize their identity on the internet through spoofing their location. For example, a person may be in Beijing but spoofs their location to New York in the United States where the sites of choice are not restricted. From the Great Firewall’s side, the IP address of the user will appear to be in a far nation and therefore the censorship won’t work as it only monitors the content within the Chinese boundaries. The VPNs creates a private network within a public network such as the internet, and therefore hides and secures data that an individual is sending and receiving (Neuman et al. 2018). The information is encrypted, meaning that a third party cannot view the contents of the message, not even the Chinese government and therefore an individual can easily bypass the great firewall simply by the use of the virtual private network (VPNs). The Shadowsocks is another way that a person can bypass the Great Firewall. It encrypts the communication between the user and the website to which they would like to visit, but the connection is hard to detect for a third-party as the technology allows to choose various encryption methods and at the same time allocating it a random port.
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Figure showing how the VPN works in bypassing the Great firewall. Source Reuters, 2017.
ConclusionChina is the only country around the globe that has made restrictions on the use of internet in their country by blocking all the international internet sites such as google, Facebook, and twitter. The main reason as to the development of the Great Firewall is to encourage and protect homegrown companies such as the Baidu and Weibo and therefore promote economic development within their boundaries. The Great firewall despite being a success have received a lot of critics in that it has restricted the freedom of speech and democracy, but the Chinese government has not been wavered by such as they have as well implemented the censorship program to promote the security of their nation. Through monitoring, the government can control the flow of content, prohibiting and restricting information that may seem to be harmful and this is the main reason the government banned Facebook and Google following the riots in Xiaoping.
The Chinese government has worked tirelessly, recruiting new forces to oversee the censorship of the internet content, but despite all these, bypassing the great firewall has always been simple and this has rendered their efforts to be useless. Most of the people use the private virtual networks to bypass the great firewall by spoofing their location and creating a private network within the Chinese network accessing all the sites and content that have been restricted by the government. Despite all these, the government have remained firm and has continued to modify their systems to restrict and make the censorship program more effective through the development of more sophisticated software to aid in monitoring information within the great firewall.
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