RConversation: Censorship Foreigners Don't See - Stuff that didn't fit in my Op-Ed

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August 15, 2008

Censorship Foreigners Don't See - Stuff that didn't fit in my Op-Ed

China's system of filtering websites by blocking web addresses and keywords of overseas websites has come to be known as the "Great Firewall." (No that is not it's official name - I believe the term was first coined by some frustrated bloggers.) But the GFW, for short, is only a small part of Chinese Internet censorship.

Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall is only one small part of Chinese Internet censorship."

My Op-ed in today's Asian Wall Street Journal, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don't See , is an effort to get people to get beyond what Internet scholar Lokman Tsui describes as a Western fixation on " Iron Curtain 2.0 " which blinds most Western observers to the realities of the Chinese Internet - and to China more generally, for that matter.

Back in June I wrote a post explaining how we need to get beyond the "wall" metaphor in order to understand Chinese Internet censorship properly. People at this year's Chinese Internet Research Conference suggested "Net Nanny" or even "Hydroelectric Management" are better metaphors for how speech is controlled on the Chinese Internet. But they're just not as sexy-sounding somehow, and lack the same nifty Soviet-era-with-Chinese-flavor overtones.

While I'm at it, another pet peeve. Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall does not equal the Golden Shield Project. The Great Firewall is only a subset of the Golden Shield."

The filtering system we call the Great Firewall is only a very small part of the official Golden Shield Project (pdf), the official goverment name for a a national initiative spanning digital surveillance, better communications and data sharing among law enforcement and security agencies, data mining, general use of ICT to improve Chinese law enforcement ...

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