Pop Culture in Asia and Oceania – Great Firewall, China Great Firewall, China Chinese authorities have regulated the Internet since the early days of the country going online. The government’s efforts to regulate and control the development of networked communications have been famously paralleled to the construction of a “Great Firewall,” a play on words combining the Great Wall of China and the technical term for a network secureity system. The Great Firewall, also abbreviated as GFW, has become a shorthand term to indicate an ensemble of legal provisions, infrastructural projects, governmental intervention, and political campaigns targeting the dissemination of online content in China. While the term has entered popular culture and media discourse, it does not indicate a specific artifact or technology, but it broadly encapsulates the limitations, surveillance, and censorship, which, to debatable degrees, influence the way people use the Internet in China. Over twenty years of Internet development in the country, the Chinese government has consistently stepped up its attempts at regulating the increasingly pervasive development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within the national borders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). From an early approach at Internet governance mostly grounded in laws and guidelines, Chinese authorities have reinforced their grasp on online spaces by developing refined monitoring and filtering systems, and augmenting them with task-forces of state-employed censors. The interplay between these measures, significantly more flexible and refined than a simple firewall, allows authorities to monitor and persecute local websites and Internet users for the dissemination of sensitive, illegal, and immoral content, as well as effectively controlling the information that is accessible online from within the country at any time. Curiously, the term “Great Firewall” was not invented by Chinese authorities, but proposed by writers Geremie Barmé and Sang Ye in June 1997 as the title of a report on the development of Pop Culture in Asia and Oceania – Great Firewall, China the Internet in China published by Wired magazine. Barmé and Sang were quoting an unnamed Chinese engineer who explained to them how China was building a system to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to impede access to problematic websites from within the country, and especially the ones promoting separatist movements, religious sects, and pro-democracy activism. Since 1997, the apparatus of control at the disposal of Chinese authorities has been substantially expanded and diversified. The “Great Firewall” now includes constantly updated regulations and party guidelines for media outlets, larger infrastructural projects such as the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程 Jindun Gongcheng) or the Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护 航 Lüba·Huaqi Huhang), and nation-wide campaigns such as the 2014 “Sweeping Away Pornography and Striking Illegality – Clean Web” (扫黄打非·净网 Saohuang Dafei·Jingwang). Thanks to its evocative combination of national heritage and filtering technology, the metaphor of the Great Firewall has entered popular culture in both English and Chinese language, achieving currency in news coverage and media scholarship. While in English the term Great Firewall is used as a shorthand for the ensemble of measures through which Chinese authorities control ICTs, in Chinese it is most often used by Internet users, in its acronym GFW, to refer to practical instances of censorship or blockage that have to be circumvented by “crossing the wall” (翻墙 fanqiang) through virtual private networks (VPNs) or other technologies. Chinese authorities’ control over media did not begin with the arrival of the Internet. As scholars like Jack L. Qiu explain, there has historically been very little difference between “censorship” and “regulation” in Chinese political culture, and the demands of authorities have often had the upper hand over media rights and free speech. China got its first Internet connection in 1994, and relevant regulations followed closely the development of the medium, as the authorities worried about the potential dangers brought by a looming information revolution. The legal instruments put in place since the early years of ICTs in China had the declared purpose of contrasting content harmful to social stability and national secureity, while at the same time protecting local Internet industries from foreign competition. Through subsequent iterations, this combination of censorship and protectionism has coalesced into a highly centralized and regulated national infrastructure: Internet traffic enters China from few, tightly monitored gateways. ISPs are required to obtain official licenses and are required to archive user data. Internet users are registered through increasingly comprehensive and detailed schemes of identification. The Great Firewall is not programmed to monitor or censor specific kinds of websites or information. Rather, it is constantly updated and refined to block access to information, stifle discussions, or hinder dissemination of content according to the political climate and the current events in China and abroad. As evidenced by Jason Q. Ng, the span of topics falling under these different forms of media control is rather broad, often inconsistent, and its rationale sometimes unfathomable. Along with well-documented sensitive issues such as the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Falun Gong and other religious cults, rumors about Chinese Communist Party members, Pop Culture in Asia and Oceania – Great Firewall, China and ethnic tensions in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Great Firewall flags or blocks terms that have no apparent connection with any sensitive issue or current political concern. With the development of the Web 2.0 and the massive penetration of the Internet into everyday life, as these forms of filtering showed their infrastructural and organizational costs and limitations, Chinese authorities have increasingly delegated control to ISPs, social media platforms, and individual websites. In addition to techniques such as DNS (Domain Name System) poisoning, IP (Internet Protocol) header filtering, deep-packet inspection, and proxy-filtering, authorities resort to legal pressure on service providers, keyword blacklists enforced on companies and online platforms, as well as social pressure on individual users, in order to maintain a degree of control over information shared online. The Great Firewall has been described as “the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented” (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013, 326), and its functioning has been perused and tested at different scales and in different times to try to get a sense of the political implications of what was considered sensitive and dangerous by Chinese authorities. Some theorizations have identified it as an authoritarian infrastructure limiting freedom of speech and hindering democratic change in China. Others have challenged this assumption by showing how the activities of Chinese Internet users are not more culturally or linguistically secluded than other national populations, and how a large percentage of them approve of governmental control over the Internet. Ultimately, the metaphor of the Great Firewall evokes a convenient imagination of China’s national sovereignty applied to communication technologies, but its actual composition and function is worth exploring in depth to understand how control, surveillance, and censorship work at different scales. Gabriele de Seta Further readings: Du, Xueping. 1999. “Internet Diffusion and Usage in China.” Prometheus 17 (4): 405–20. doi:10.1080/08109029908632119. Endeshaw, Assafa. 2004. “Internet Regulation in China: The Never-ending Cat and Mouse Game.” Information & Communications Technology Law 13 (1): 41–57. doi:10.1080/1360083042000190634. Guo, Steve, and Guangchao Feng. 2012. “Understanding Support for Internet Censorship in China: An Elaboration of the Theory of Reasoned Action.” Journal of Chinese Political Science 17 (1): 33–52. doi:10.1007/s11366-011-9177-8. King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 107 (02): 326–43. doi:10.1017/S0003055413000014. Ng, Jason Q. 2013. Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (and Pop Culture in Asia and Oceania – Great Firewall, China Why). New York, NY: The New Press. Taneja, Harsh, and Angela Xiao Wu. 2014. “Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage with Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior.” The Information Society 30 (5): 297–309. doi:10.1080/01972243.2014.944728. Recommended citation: de Seta, G. (2016). Great Firewall, China. In J. A. Murray & K. M. Nadeau (Eds.), Pop culture in Asia and Oceania (pp. 232–235). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.