China’s Internet Censorship Explained
Written by Julen Madariaga on January 22nd, 2009Since I started posting about censorship I’ve noticed that the basics of the system are not clearly understood by many readers outside China. This post is to classify and explain the system in the most simple way possible. It is largely drawn from my own experience as a user in China and from the studies by Rebecca Mackinnon.
The internet censorship in China is a complex system in constant evolution, both technologically and in terms of the content censored. It is managed by the State Council Information Office - Internet Management Division. Until recently it was mostly referred to by foreigners as the Great FireWall of China (GFW), but today the name of Net Nanny is more in use, especially since studies like this one exposed the limitations of the GFW metaphor.
In fact, both names can be used, as they refer to different mechanisms of the censorship system and they help visualize the basics for non China-dwellers. Man gave names to all the animals, and let’s give clear names to these ones too so that we can avoid further confusion. China’s Censorship system is composed of: the Net Nanny, the Great Firewall (GFW), and the Search Engines Manipulation (SEM). Note the important differences between the three, which can be summarized as follows:
- the Nanny eliminates content, by forcing self-censorship.
- The GFW blocks content from access in mainland China.
- The SEM hides content, making sites unsearchable/invisible.
These three elements or any combination of them are currently used to censor content on the Chinese internet.
1- The Net Nanny
Like a nanny does with naughty kids, the government scolds rebellious citizens who publish content of “vulgar” or political nature. The Net Nanny is the mechanism that controls content by putting pressure on the publishers to self-censor. Of course, Net Nanny methods are only applied when publishers are in some way subject to the power of the Chinese government. Normally because either they are Chinese, have business in China, or have their websites hosted in China.
The Nanny’s power comes from its ability to close down a website, take away the business license or directly impose “stern punishment” on offenders. The Nanny monitors compliance using a large human workforce aided by sophisticated devices that sweep or sniff the data moving about the Chinese internet. She regularly warns the publishers, either privately or in public inquisitorial lists that make the headlines in Western media.
Final users suffer the Nanny in one of the two following ways:
- The site where they read/publish content is found non-compliant and closed down, like recently happened to bullog.
- The site where they read/publish content is self-censoring, erasing individual user’s content or refusing to publish it.
In all cases, content censored or “harmonized” by the Nanny is not accessible from anywhere, regardless of the use of coded connections. This content is not blocked, but simply eliminated from the internet.
2- The Great Firewall of China (GFW)
The Great Firewall is a different creature altogether, although closely related. It is another tool that the Information Office uses to control access to content. As opposed to the Nanny, the GFW is not directly based on human interaction, but rather on a series of technological devices that are able to detect the sensitive content entering the Chinese internet and block it, whether the original site is in China or not. Depending on the devices used, the GFW can come in different flavours, such as “Reset Connection” or “Time Out”, but the result is always the same: the page cannot load in mainland China.
The blocks applied by the Great Firewall of China are often very quick, automated, and without previous notice to the publishers. In fact, it can happen that the owners of the site go for a long time without noticing, especially if China is not an important part of their business.
Other characteristics of the GFW are:
- It is only visible to users in mainland China.
- It is erratic and unpredictable, block can last hours or years.
- It is easy to bypass using coded connections, like VPN or web proxies.
- It can affect a single post, a website or a whole host/subnet.
- GFW often tries to disguise itself as technical problems of the Chinese network.
GFW is the most annoying part of the Chinese censorship. One might think it is worthless, since it can be bypassed by widely available free proxies. In fact it is extremely effective, due to a mixture of laziness and lack of information of the public. Using myself as an example, there are some excellent blogs I had not visited for months just to avoid the (minor) hassle of connecting through proxy. How many Chinese would go out of their way to access political documents like Chrter 08 that they’ve never heard of and they cannot locate in their Search Engines anyway? (see below SEM)
But the worst aspect of GFW is that it embodies the complete lack of respect of the censors for the individual rights of the users. Indeed, to avoid access to a few pages, the GFW regularly blocks whole subnets without previous notice, affecting thousands of users that had nothing to do with the non-compliance in the first place. There are many examples of this, one of them is the major blog hosting service “Blogger”, which has been blocked in China for years.
3- The Search Engine Manipulation (SEM)
This is the part of the censorship system specifically dedicated to Search Engines. Technically it is not a new mechanism, but a caffeinated Net Nanny applied to Search. The main difference lies in the essential role of the Search Engines in directing internet traffic, and the enormous potential for manipulaton that Search Result lists provide. Note that SEM refers only to the List of Search Results itself, and not to the possible blocks happening when clicking on one of the individual resuts, which would belong to point (2) above.
When an internet user looks for a term in a Search Engine, he is trusting this Engine to bring him the most relevant results for that Search. A List of Search Results that is manipulated to show only what the government wants to show is one of the most powerful tools of deception, and one that is less obvious to the final user than the plain blocking of websites. The websites that don’t appear on the list are not perceived as “censored”, they are simply nonexistent.
Like any other websites, the Search Engines can suffer the 2 kinds of censorship described above.
1- They “harmonize” their Result Lists, following the Nanny. This is properly SEM.
2- They get some Search Strings blocked by the GFW. This is just a URL block of the GFW.
Note that, while (1) is a flagrant case of Search Engines actively collaborating with the system, in (2) it is the URL of the search that trips the GFW, and the Search Engine’s responsibility if any is ony passive (ie. they don’t fight against it) (*). As far as I have seen, all the search engines based in China, including Google, Yahoo and Baidu practice SEM, the most form of censorship. I already did a little study of SEM recently where you can see some results.
(*)UPDATE: Following suggestions by international expert Nart Villeneuve: I have introduced a few changes of my own in my SEM post. It is very important to understand the role of Search Engines in GFW censorship: to get the details of this complex question you should read proper research papers like this one, or this one.
Also by same author a suggestion of what could be the 4th and newest animal in the Censor’s farm: application-specific censorship such as the censoring of IM’s by qq and Skype.
UPDATE2: Coming back to this post one year later I realize that I have learnt a lot since then, and I have corrected a few details. There are also some aspects that are missing, like details about how the GFW works, the IP, URL and keyword blocks, etc. which I learnt when this blog was GFWed in June 09. You can read all about that in the comprehensive instructions I did after I managed to unblock it.
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NOTE: Comments and corrections welcome. Also please let me know if something is not clear enough so I can edit/clarify.
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22
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Great post, uln. We were actually able to bypass the GFW block on Skritter by setting up a reverse proxy on a non-blocked host — requests come in from China to that host, it passes the request on to the blocked host and gets the response back, then passes it to the user in China. It increases our lag and hosting costs a bit, but it was relatively simple to set up on our end.
Although, if you get blocked because of all your Daring Posting Action, this technique won’t help you, because they’ll just reblock your new IP. Good luck evading the SEMGFWNN!
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23
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Thanks. Hey, I just tried it and it is true, Skritter works! Lately I am surfing with my VPN on all the time, and I didn’t take the time to disconnect it and try your site in “chinese conditions”. My bad
Oh, well, I guess I will have to write a new example now.
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There you go, I cut it out and leave it here on comments in case someone wants to claim it back
“Another sad example, the startup Skritter, which has been blocked just in the critical phase when it was deploying its operations in China, in spite of providing an admirable and innovative service to Chinese culture. The reason? they were just using the wrong host at the wrong time.”
[Reply to this comment]
Shak Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 10:33 am
hey ULN i am using your information for a research paper for my gr 12 world issues class, it would be greatly appreciated if you could provide me with your name first and last because i need to Cite you
email to
too.sickk@hotmail.com
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23
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I am not a computer geek so bear with me- do I understand that people in Mainland China can still blog about sensitive subjects such as Chrter 08 despite the GFW, Net Nanny and SEM? The reason I ask is because I recently got an e-mail from someone who claims to live in China stating that he is against government censorship and plans to emigrate to Canada. I wasn’t sure if the e-mail was for real and if so, was concerned about responding and perhaps getting him in trouble.
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24
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Well. I am in mainland China, I am writing pretty sensitive stuff and I am (still) not blocked by GFW, Nanny or SE. so there’s your answer.
I guess this is because I am a very small blog and I write in English, so I still haven’t attracted the censor’s attention.
Blogs that write in Chinese do get censored pretty quickly, especially those writing about Chrter 08. So yes, the person who write you is probably telling the truth. As for getting him in trouble: you shouldn’t worry, unless he is a prominent figure of dissent movement he won’t get in trouble for that. For normal “small” bloggers like us, the worse we get is a blocked website.
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There is another type of self-censorship described here:
http://www.bruce-humes.com/?p=17#comments
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26
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Hi BF, thanks for that link, it is really interesting and I have subscribed to that blog.
Actually, what I find most interesting in it is not only the censorship aspect, but also what it says about the problems of translation. I have been looking lately into the strange world of Chinese translations, I hope I can finish my post about it after the holidays.
There is a real problem with translation of foreign literature into Chinese, partly because of the technical difficulty, but also I believe for the lack of sensibility of the translators/Chinese public to keep loyalty to the original. It is already hard enough to sell literature in China, so translators take a very practical approach of making the text “as easy as possible for Chinese”. This contributes to the distorted image that many chinese have of the exterior wordl and of western literature in particular.
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3
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Could this all just be pseudo censorship to cover up a campaign of blogs that people actually fall for.
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3
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I am not sure I understand your question well.
If you mean: is there an international conspiracy of China bloggers to make all the world believe that there is censorship when in fact there is not, the answer is: no.
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3
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You dont think that the censors have their own blogs?
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3
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1- No, I don’t think most of the censors have blogs. Although yes there are a good deal of blogger 5maos around that collaborate with the censors.
2- Again, I’m not sure I understand your point. We are chatting in parallel dimensions. Can you be a bit more specific?
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3
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I can confirm that censorship does exist in many forms and especially in Internet Cafe’ and also in well know hotels even to the extent that hidden cameras exist. I have pictures of my recent room with the camera lens visible under the top draw of a night-stand.
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4
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I found your blog on Chrter 08 through a search on Google in English. If you’re interested, here is a link to one in Chinese. It has the text of the charter in Chinese, English, and French, plus a bunch of readers’ comments in Chinese:
https://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3jhi1zdzvxj3f/9#
I think Alou was suggesting you might be a Chinese government ‘stooge’ blog set up to persuade westerners that there isn’t censorship in China, rather than a western stooge blog pretending that there is.
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5
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I was wondering whether the censorship was a pretence to make distractions from the State Council’s instrumentalization of the media in China.
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5
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Ah, OK, I see. Just in case, to clarify my point of view:
1- I am not a stooge blog either way, I don’t want to persuade anyone of anything, I just write my personal observations and opinions about China. I am glad when people disagrees with them because that usually sparks debate. I have been known to change my views after a resoned argument in this or other forums.
2- The censorship is no pretence or trick. It is just what it is: censorship. The instrumentalization of Chinese media is a bit different, in that it is mostly self-censorship from the editors of these media. But I agree it is all part of the same phenomenon: The CPC trying to keep control of all the information circulating in China, with the main objective in mind of keeping: harmony and stability.
One interesting anecdote related to this obsession to control information is found in the excellent book by J McGregor: 1 Billion Customers. It explains how Xinhua and tje Propaganda Office went so far as to try Censor/Control the financial data screens of Reuters and Dow Jones.
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13
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I thought that this story by David Ferguson was interesting because it is on a website run by the Information Office yet it is about the forbidden subject of Chrter 08.
http://www.china.org.cn/international/2009-01/14/content_17106331.htm
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13
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Haha, yes, it is interesting.
Actually I already did a post about it some time ago, calling D.Ferguson a hero for posting this link right under the China.org’s nose. He never reacted to it, so my guess is indeed his intention was to support Chrter 08.
Check it out here:
http://chinayouren-free.com/2009/01/charter-08-found-an-open-link/
Surprisingly, the knol link still works fine!
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15
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Sorry, I didnt see your post on the story.
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23
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Hola! Yo quiero saber si me puedes ayudar.
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13
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Here are three proxies that I have found to work in China with screecasts to explain each: http:/www.laowise.com/blog/category/3
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9
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What about USA collection of all emails private and others. What about silver bullet if you write or you know too much
better look at your home then look at china.
Or go to New York and try to walk after 8 PM. Crime ,sick crime, child pornography, prostitution, force and other not mentioned atrocity committed by government,
Just look at Iraqi and forced contract from Iraqi for oil, kill for oil, and sale a nuclear devices to Taiwan, Clinton sex, and now his wife, -great democracy is it
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Jerry, I think you are out of line with your comment basically stating that democracy is a bad thing and comparing it to communism. The problem you are facing in china is probably worse than that. You just don’t know about it because it has been censored so that harmony and stability is created, or should I mention false harmony and stability. The crimes you generally face are committed by government, and the same government hides that fact. How can you make a comparison of the differences in governments if you do not have the facts thanks to censorship?
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tc Reply:
April 25th, 2010 at 10:10 am
@Leon, I do not see jerry’s comment “stating that democracy is a bad thing and comparing it to communism.” He did not mention “democracy”, “communism” at all.
I believe you are “out of line with your comment”.
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@tc, may I attract your attention to the entire conversation, not just one sentence or part of a comment. The implication is democracy vs communism. Then his last words were: “great democracy is it”
I suggest you read the entire thread, and do not jump to conclusions.
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