How It Works The Great Firewall of China

If you have ever been to China, you may have experienced a lack of access to the same websites you love and enjoy around the rest of the world. Websites such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook are either blocked completely or slowed to a crawl and throttled to an almost unusable state. Known as the Great Firewall of China, this censorship engine allows the Chinese government to regulate the internet and protect its citizens from dangerous content, or at least that's what they claim. Many, however, criticize China due to the sheer lack of freedom allowed when using the internet, which has landed China at the number one spot in terms of worst for online internet freedom. As technology has advanced, the Great Firewall has seen many changes over the years with increasing complexity and sophistication. China's Great Firewall is only getting stronger with new technology and the onset of artificial intelligence to improve existing security measures. Roughly a year ago, China was able to display their dominant censorship capabilities by outright banning cryptocurrency trading overnight. With foreign cryptocurrency exchanges blocked and local exchanges forced to relocate overseas, the industry disappeared almost like it never even existed. China even bans more whimsical items on the internet such as Winnie the Pooh. Yes, that's right, Winnie the Pooh. Who could possibly be afraid of Winnie the Pooh? The Chinese government, apparently. This all started in 2013 when an image of Xi Jinping and then-president Barack Obama spurred comparisons of the president's look to that of Winnie the Pooh, and the memes started flowing. This must have really gotten under Xi's skin because as the popularity of the memes grew and spread online, Chinese censors began picking up the images and erasing them and thus banning poor Winnie the Pooh from all of China. Other, more serious topics are suppressed from the Chinese internet such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. This pro-democracy protest in which an estimated 10,000 Chinese citizens were killed all but doesn't exist on the Chinese internet. Just try typing in June 4th, the day of the massacre, into Google versus Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine, and see the difference. It really is quite alarming. This gives the Chinese government incredible power to shape the minds of its citizenry and prohibit content it deems unfit. Back in the 1980s, the leader of China at the time, Deng Xiaoping, reformed much of China's economy and brought forth the modern China that we know today. He knew, however, that as economic development and progress increased in China, along with it came unwanted Western beliefs and ideologies that the Chinese government did not have any interest in. As part of this economic resurgence, the internet was opened up to China in the mid-1990s and Project Golden Shield was launched to aid in overseeing this new frontier. Soon, however, the charter of this project morphed to include mass censorship and surveillance and ultimately, the Great Firewall of China was born. So you may be asking yourself exactly how does the Chinese government monitor and control such a vast network and essentially segregate their internet from the rest of the world? They do this through three primary methods, the first being IP blocking. This one is pretty straightforward. For a typical PC setup on the internet in the United States, the computer requiring access to the website will send a download request to the destination server where the content they wish to consume is stored. This server will then ping back to the user's computer with response data that includes its own IP address and also the data requested along with it. With IP blocking enabled, this functions much differently. In China, the Great Firewall sits in between the Chinese telco provider and the external foreign server that the user is attempting to access. This firewall is able to filter the data that moves between the local servers and the overseas servers and block data coming from IPs which are disallowed. The second method used to restrict data is known as DNS poisoning. DNS, or Domain Name System, is a method by which to associate domain names with IP addresses. After entering a domain name into your browser, your computer needs to determine the IP address associated with that domain name in order to know which server to retrieve the desired content from. Let's say, for example, you enter google.com into your browser. Your computer cannot find the IP address for this domain in the local cache and connects to the DNS servers provided by your internet service provider, or ISP. The DNS servers will query the root DNS servers which will then query the global top level domain servers and redirect the query to Google's name servers. These name servers will respond with the IP address for this domain and then the DNS server will then cache this IP address and forward it to your PC. Your computer will then connect to the IP address received and ask for the content for google.com. With the Great Firewall, instead of the name servers returning the correct IP address associated with google.com, they will poison the DNS. This occurs while the IP address is in transit back to your computer. It is here where the IP address information will be intercepted via a gateway server that manipulates the DNS response. By filtering content on certain keywords, China is able to decipher which domains to poison and deny service. The third way that China manages to catch non-authorized content is by self-censorship and manual enforcement. According to Chinese laws and regulations, Chinese firms are completely and wholly responsible for their content. As such, Chinese firms employ thousands of workers to police their own sites and pull down content that is deemed inappropriate. These workers monitor social media sites, message boards, instant messages, and more. Additionally, the Chinese government itself is estimated to employ several hundred thousand or even millions of people according to some reports to sift through the web and report unauthorized content while posting government propaganda. Despite these methods, there are ways to circumvent the Great Firewall by using what is known as a Virtual Private Network or VPN. Also known as climbing over the wall within China, VPNs offer a cheap and effective method to reach the outside world. A VPN works by creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the VPN provider's server before forwarding on and retrieving information from the desired server. This allows the user to send and receive data securely without exposure to any authorities. As long as the VPN server is located outside of the country, it will be able to retrieve whatever data you wish and send it back to you via the encrypted tunnel. This method of circumventing the Great Firewall has become more and more popular and has been subject to some major crackdowns as of late. As the firewall's technology advances, more and more VPNs are being banned or blocked by identifying VPN-looking traffic and killing those connections permanently, preventing them from ever reaching a foreign server again. The firewall has performed well as an effective barrier to Western ideas and beliefs. Chinese tech companies have grown without the fear of foreign competition which has led to the rise of Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. The strict regulations regarding what can and can't be posted online has deterred most Western tech companies from even considering entering the Chinese market. On the flip side, the firewall has caused a great deal of damage to scientific progress and innovation since so much of the scholarly work developed overseas cannot be accessed which limits the exchange of ideas and knowledge necessary to advance society. To the typical Chinese local, the Great Firewall is likely not a big deal, but to the intellectual, the businessman, or the innovator, the restrictions are likely quite burdensome. It remains to be seen what long-term effects these policies will have on the Chinese economy as a whole, but for now expect internet freedom in China to remain limited.