This paper was originally presented at a symposium organised by LSE IDEAS and T.wai – Torino World Affairs Institute, in cooperation with Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin. The edited version is published in the 2024 report, titled: CTRL + power: the (geo)politics of digital authoritarianism.
On 14th September 1987, the very first email was sent from China, declaring with high hopes: “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world”.[1] More than 35 years later, however, what is now known as the Great (Fire)Wall of China has created a world unto itself, whereby “those inside the Firewall cannot see outside, and those outside cannot see inside”. Nevertheless, a crucial exception is how the Chinese government itself transcends that Firewall to engage in increasingly sophisticated and pervasive forms of illicit internet activity beyond the national boundaries of the Firewall.
In fact, Fang-long Shih recounts, “while in the 1990s the Chinese government vocally supported the expansion of internet connectivity, it simultaneously took steps to control it as soon as the internet was opened to the general public in 1995. And in 1997, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security issued the Measures for the Security Protection Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks, which were approved by the State Council. In the same year, Beijing introduced its first laws criminalising online postings considered to represent a threat to national security, which pragmatically means the security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)”.
Indeed, as DigiChina specialist Rogier Creemers observed, “As the internet became a publicly accessible information and communication platform, there was no debate about whether it should fall under government supervision, only about how such control would be implemented in practice” (2017: 266-7). Said otherwise, Shih observes that “organisational warfare (zuzhi zhan組織戰) played a significant role in the CCP’s initial consolidation of power. ‘Mobilising one group of people to fight against another (qunzhong dou qunzhong群眾鬥群眾)’ has, since the CCP’s rise, become an iconic tactic in cracking down on enemies and dissidents.” Shih further comments that, since the advent of the digital age, “controlling the internet has always been part and parcel of China’s digital governance, which is central to maintaining the CCP’s hold on power”.
Shih’s presentation is thus not about how the digital world would change China, but how China has changed the digital world. The Great Firewall is a sophisticated system of techniques and methods that the Chinese government uses to balance internet connectivity with tight controls. One of the most pervasive ways in which the Great Firewall is used to censor online content is called ‘sniffing’. This refers to how the CCP deploys intrusion detection technologies to detect and block keywords that are deemed sensitive by the government (examples include terms like ‘Xi Jinping’, ‘Taiwan independence’, ‘democracy’).
The Firewall works in conjunction with behaviour-based methods, whereby censors analyse web traffic and server names to find suspicious websites and block them manually. Certain domains—such as google.com or facebook.com—are blacklisted, meaning Chinese users are unable to access them without bypassing the ever-tighter meshes of the Great Firewall. For example, Shih notes, “In the 1990s, China’s internet forums known as BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) having more than 1,000 views could attract police attention. Later, in the Weibo era, the threshold has halved to 500”. At the same time, websites and apps that wish to operate in China need an Internet Content Provider (ICP) Registration permit issued by the Chinese government.
It is important to notice, however, that such censorship functions are not purely performed by government agencies. Indeed, to control the digital world, the Chinese government often outsources censorship to domestic and international companies—such as the US-based Cisco Systems, which helped the CCP build the Great Firewall. By using market mechanisms and fostering competition within the private sector, the Chinese government ensures that its censorship efforts remain efficient and updated. As Shih further explains, “Domestic private companies often compete for government contracts, striving to be as effective as possible due to small profit margins. If these efforts were carried out solely by government agencies and civil servants, they would likely be less efficient due to a lack of profit motive and market competition”.
China’s digital governance is therefore not characterised by complete control. Rather, as hinted above, the CCP has engaged in a careful and delicate balancing act between connectivity and control, devolving some key parameters of control to the private sector. Thus the CCP’s authoritarian control is not directly administered. Nor is its authoritarian control absolute since, as Shih emphasises, “Chinese netizens and dissidents have found creative ways to elude the filtering and blocking of online content. For instance some netizens are adept at using sarcasm, as in the case of the hashtag #ChinaIsAGreatPlaceToLive, or the many mocking posts shared online during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as ‘We need to refuse the vaccine in the horrible West, because chief Hu Xijin’s (of the Global Times state media) saliva drops are the best vaccines for us’”. Some Chinese dissidents are also able to bypass the Great Firewall altogether, through quasi-legal VPNs[1] but most who use VPNs do so for purposes not seen as threatening by the CCP, and hence implicitly condoned. The point is that the CCP always reserves the potential to clamp down in particular circumstances (such as June 4th, October 1st, People’s Congress period) or in relation to the proliferation of certain searches or trigger words. According to one of Shih’s informants, “If I really want to circumvent the extant barrier, it is becoming more and more time-consuming, at timers up to 40 minutes for a single search”. Other informants say that despite the opportunity that exists for many to transcend the Firewall “most Chinese citizens do not bother because they are happy to operate within the Firewall and they deem the information they could access beyond the Firewall ‘not of use’ for them in China”.
Shih concludes that in the information age, the strategy of organisational warfare has become even more intensified. The CCP uses the Firewall to continue mobilising one group of people inside the Firewall (known as Xiaofenhong小粉紅) to fight against another group outside the Firewall. These dynamics inside and outside the Firewall lead to social division within China and between China and the rest of the world. This aligns with Mao Zedong’s saying, “greater chaos in the world, greater benefits [to the CCP] (天下大亂，形勢大好)”, later becoming a guiding principle of the CCP. A supposed threat to social division is portrayed as a threat that the CCP builds up and mobilizes for its own benefit, using it as justification for its surveillance, censorship and crackdown on so-called ‘dissidents’, whether located within or in countries beyond the Firewall. These digital trends allow for increasing ways to stabilise Chinese authoritarian governance and to manipulate rules, norms, and computer codes so that citizens are cajoled into rationally acting out the leadership’s will. The Chinese government’s control has developed a logic of its own, epitomised by the omni-surveillant reach of the social credit system (社會信用體系). The CCP has taken key elements of digital technology in a new authoritarian direction, primarily geared to preventing opposition and dissent. This raises the question as to whether China’s deployment of digital technology should be seen in a comparative and historical perspective as exceptional—as a substantial change—or merely a change in intensity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Creemers, Rogier (2017) “Cyber-Leninism: the political culture of the Chinese internet.” In M. Price & N. Stremlau (eds.), Speech and society in turbulent times: freedom of expression in comparative perspective (pp. 255-273). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.