The Great Firewall is how the system of Internet Censorship in China is called. The system is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations consist of more than 60 Internet regulations made by the Chinese communist government. As said by Deng Xiaoping in early 1980’s: “If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.” which was related to the “socialist market economy” era in China, this is the political and ideological background of China’s internet censorship. Although the reform of the Cultural Revolution led China towards a market economy, the Chinese Communist Party has been keeping its effort to protect its inside environment from the “swatting flies” of western ideologies (Abbott, 2004).
Filtering keywords is not just what the Great firewall is capable of. The three major function that the Great Firewall operates are filtering, blocking and deleting (The Congressional-Executive Commission on China, retrieved 2015). Deleting is only aimed for websites hosted in China, which means it only occurs to those that are entirely under the radar of the Great Firewall. Netizens posting sensitive or harmful information (or even mentioning them) will receive penalty or even have their accounts deleted. This method is also used for preventing propaganda or “false truth” when incidents with huge impact to the public occurred, like the Wenzhou Train Collide Incident (Bamman D et al, 2012).
While filtering and blocking are what gives the most impact to netizens in China that are trying to get access to the deep web for them – could be anywhere existed they want to reach, such as, Google and Facebook.
Filtering:
Keyword searches related to certain news are shown as no result, especially on the most popular social network, a microblog website WEIBO and the largest Internet search engine Baidu. An example of this is shown in Figure 1), where an attempt to search for “Liu Xiaobo” on 30 October 2011 is met with a message stating that, “according to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results were not shown.” Reports of other search terms being blocked on Sina Weibo include “Jasmine” and “Egypt” in early 2011, “Ai Weiwei” on his release from prison in June 2011, “Zengcheng” during migrant protests in that city in June 2011, and “Jon Huntsman” after his attendance at a Beijing protest in February 2011(Bamman D et al, 2012).
Figure 1) where an attempt to search for “Liu Xiaobo” on 30 October 2011 is met with a message stating that, “according to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results were not shown.” Source: Internet
Blocking:
Websites and IP address of web hosts with sensitive or “harming” information or ideologies classified by the CCP are filtered by the GFW and are blocked from visiting from inside China. Most of these websites are hosted from IP outside of China. The loading results often shown as “timeout” “Page cannot be displayed” or “cannot open website”. Blocked websites include major social network such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, search engine Google, and international organisations. Tor has been reportedly block by the GFW by simple IP blocks, which stopped users in China from visiting their official website, and later on the blocking has extended to the whole Tor bundle, including entering and exiting traffic, which the details will be discussed later in this session of the report.
Figure 2) where an attempt to open Wikipedia (Chinese) is met with a message saying “Safari cannot open this page as server stopped respond.” Source: Yang YU.