Great Firewall
I grew up without knowing Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail. And these things seemed irrelevant for me while I lived in China. After I came to the US, as a transfer student, I realized that social media are a core element of communications and have a great impact on our society. Why had I never heard about these websites in China ? When I went back to China from the US , Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are just simply did not respond as it turns out the Chinese government blocks these sites from reaching to their users. Once, I had many important documents that I uploaded into Google Drive to back up and saved for later editing, and when my dad wanted to check my work, he cannot open any documents because Google would not load. The Great Firewall, also known as the Golden Shield Project, became apparent to me as a barrier between China and the free internet around the world.
The Great Firewall is the name of a firewall established by the Chinese government in its jurisdiction over the Internet within the establishment of some network censorship systems. So how does the Great Firewall work? In short, a DNS server translates the computer's domain request into an IP address where the internet protocol recognizes. This is where the Firewall comes into play, by blocking everything that could translate these fields from letters to numbers, and intercept any attempts to establish connections to these IP’s, the firewall handles and stops any link that is on its blacklist. Besides, with the recent progressions in artificial intelligence and human neuron training networks, the Great Firewall extends its reach into identifying proxies and VPN’s which was go-to for Chinese citizens to bypass the firewall.
It is not difficult to find that many people hold a negative attitude towards the Great firewall, also as many Western countries, human rights advocates and pro-internet freedom organizations have strongly condemned the act of extreme censorship. There is no denying that it limits access to information and it does not satisfy the curiosity of some people. That is why the firewall has been criticized, yet by implementing those extreme measures of censorship and essentially controlling the internet and how much the outside world Chinese citizens can reach, many human rights violations could not be reported, as cover-ups occur often. When I was doing my assignment for my current events class, I found out that many people have their comments and they put those comments on Twitter or many different social media platforms. I was thinking about why China could not have those open platforms where we can read every single comment from others, instead of blogging about those things.
The Great Firewall has some benefits too , in the Internet era, the whole world experiences a surge of new information . It 's hard to avoid the influence of Western culture as the cultural exchange is unavoidable. Also, Chinese traditional culture suffered a significant impact as people tend to favor foreign traditions over the local ones, the emergence of the Great Firewall to some extent could be argued that it has protected China's traditional culture and it plays a particular role in stabilizing the country. China is in a high-speed developmental stage as it slowly emerges as a superpower, and it is undeniable that some countries are eyeing it. They want to suppress China and force political change . The shocking surveillance program like Prism and the Snowden leak incident are examples; Using the Internet as a convenient tool, people can publish various kinds of information anytime. Many criminals spread false rumors and propaganda on the web, which can easily cause widespread hysteria among the people. Therefore, the firewall also effectively reduces the spread of potential negative publicity.
Of course, the disadvantages of the Great Firewalls are also very obvious. Not only should it be considered a human rights violation, it also drastically limits the public's rights to connect. Resulting in the people’s inability to obtain information is about the outside world. Many foreign Internet companies that want to move into China are also blocked by the firewall due to many different and unclear reasons. For the students who are studying in foreign countries , like me, if we go back to China , we could not access important school materials as the content delivery network , like Google Drive, is blocked in China.
It is precisely because of this, and there are a lot of people using VPN’s that supports protocols designed for the Chinese firewall and other obfuscation software to bypass and reach the outside world. What we have to admit is that in the Internet industry, the gap between China and foreign countries is still very large. A lot of China's best-known Internet products are inspired by some of the products from abroad, as the Chinese tech industry still largely remains in manufacturing instead of designing entirely new devices, as we can see the biggest hardware chip companies like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA are all Western-based. However, in China there are only big manufacturing companies that take advantage of the hardware these Western companies produce.
In a broad sense, each country has its firewall to ensure national security and stability, but China has the most stringent regulatory model. I think the use of firewalls has two sides, so we should try our best to reduce the negative effects.
