This website is my first experience with state sponsored censorship and it has been an interesting process trying to determine just how China is protecting its citizens from the perils of the global Internet. Beijing has spent an estimated $800M in network hardware and employs approximately 30,000 people to monitor how the people of China are using the Internet. The official mandate for the Golden Shield Shield Project, aka the Great Firewall of China, is to prevent access to sites and content Beijing deems pornographic or subversive.
To understand how the Great Firewall works, it helps if you think of how you access sites on the Internet like using a phone book. If you know the name of a site you want to visit, say www.tomgrace.net, you'd type the name into your browser. In the vast white pages of the Internet, this name links up to a specific IP address (www.tomgrace.net = 209.11.45.15). Your browser dials the IP number and you are connected to the site.
If you don't know the name of the site, you would use a search engine to locate the site by what it's about. A search for "secret cardinal tom grace" would return my website along with other sites either selling the book or posting reviews. This is like searching the yellow pages for an architect or a plumber, and selecting from those advertising in the appropriate section. If you search for laogai or falun gong, you will get a much different response in China than elsewhere in the world. In China, a search for Tiananmen Square will not locate any material about the 1989 massacre.
If Beijing finds a site subversive, or if it is tied to an enemy of the state, that site's IP address will be explicitly blocked. This is the equivalent of taking a black Sharpie marker and striking out that listing in the white pages of the phone book. You can enter the site name, but you won't find that site. Content Beijing objects to is filtered by the search engines and the censors, like removing the architects or lawyers sections from the yellow pages.
My website contains links to five forbidden sites in China, which you will find in the 8/1/2008 entry of this blog. These sites cover religious persecution in China, the Chinese laogai prison system, Tibet's government in exile, and Pope Benedict's 2007 letter to Chinese Catholics (possession/distribution of which is illegal in China). If you access my site in China and click on these links, you will get a page error as if the site does not exist. That's the Firewall's IP address block at work.
Now for the fun part. Google and Yahoo have both caught a lot of flack for cooperating with Beijing in implementing the Great Firewall. If you use Google.cn to find my site, and access it using the BETA "Translate this page" tool, my site will pop up in computer generated Chinese, except for the blog. If you select the 8/1/2008 entry and try the links, all five work. I've tested this with some friends in China and, so far, it works at providing a backdoor to these forbidden sites.
Labels: Falun Gong, Golden Shield, Great Firewall, laogai, persecution China, Tibet
