People have nicknamed the security system that monitors and controls internet traffic entering and leaving China “The Great Firewall of China.”
But a firewall is just the beginning of the Communist country’s censorship system, new research from Northeastern University finds.
“The image that people have now — ‘The Great Firewall’ — is very evocative, but it isn’t very accurate anymore,” says Laura Edelson, assistant professor of computer sciences at Northeastern. “There is absolutely a system in place that just keeps foreign information out, but by itself, that system wouldn’t be very effective. There are these other layers of the system in place.”
So, instead of a Great Firewall, Edelson calls a framework for understanding Chinese censorship “The Locknet” for its resemblance to water locks that can allow or stop the flow of information into and within the country.
“I think about it like an artificial lake in the middle of the ocean,” Edelson explains. “For the most part, the systems reinforce each other and they can maintain this little separate body of water, but it is connected, and just as sometimes the larger internet sloshes over, sometimes the “Locknet” leaks out.”
It’s no secret that China — like all countries, Edelson notes — censors its internet. But while many Western democracies have clear laws outlining what is forbidden online, exactly how Chinese censorship operates, its effectiveness and how much that censorship alters the internet in the rest of the world isn’t well understood.
Edelson and a researcher on China’s governance and society at online magazine ChinaFile sought to answer these questions and others in a yearlong investigation.
They found that China has a dynamic, adaptable and multi-layered, self-reinforcing censorship system.
The system works on three main levels.
Network-level censorship is the so-called Great Firewall, blocking foreign content from coming into China at the country’s borders.
Service-level censorship exists on any platform or service offered inside the country — all of which must comply with Chinese censorship rules.
Finally, self-censorship occurs on the individual level as citizens censor what they put online in order to comply with the state.
But there are some key aspects of the censorship system that make it effective.
First, the three levels of censorship reinforce each other.
Service-level censorship forbids VPNs, certain apps and services like Meta, for instance, thereby limiting the foreign information reaching Chinese users and reinforcing network-level censorship.
Second, enforcement is “intentionally intermittent” but consequential.
Accessing banned content or posting criticism of the government can — but will not always — get a user “invited to tea,” Edelson explains, where the user will be brought into a police station, questioned for hours, made to sign a confession and — if said tea parties happen often enough — be sent to jail.
This encourages people to self-censor or “to stay within the lines,” as Edelson says, comparing this intermittent but consequential enforcement to obeying the speed limit in a Western democracy.
“Sometimes you can wildly violate the speed limit and drive 100 miles per hour down the highway and not get pulled over,” Edelson says. “But most people don’t because they know that if you drive 100 mph down the highway, you will eventually get caught and you could get caught at any time.”
What that results in, she explains, is a population that generally stays within bounds — say at 5 mph above the speed limit — but could technically be pulled over at any time.
Moreover, enforcement is often contracted out to individual companies whose success depends on remaining in Beijing’s good graces.
“They get instruction from the federal government, but they have a lot of leeway as to how they implement those censorship rules,” Edelson says. “So, companies are truly compelled to follow these rules and, if they don’t, those companies will cease to exist and their executives will go to jail.”
Which leads to the third point: the rules and regulations of what is censored are expansive, but vague and flexible.
“What is banned changes day by day,” Edelson says. “There are some things that they do say ‘these things are banned,’ but then there’s this whole other category of things that just disappear and that there’s no public visibility, there’s no transparency.”
Again, this vagueness encourages self-censorship and reinforces censorship at the company or service provider level (if in doubt, leave it out), and the network level.
But with a global internet, Edelson says the Locknet is not just affecting users in China.
“It is very appealing to systems makers to make a platform or a service that they can offer both inside China and outside China. And if they’re going to do that, then they have to be subject to China’s censorship,” Edelson says.
Edelson also cites the example of Chinese AI systems and tools, which may be cheaper, more efficient, publicly available … and also likely trained according to Chinese censorship models or censored in some way.
And while the internet was created by Westerners with Western democratic ideals in mind, that doesn’t mean that future developments will be.
“The thing to remember is that you can make a standard that is easier to surveil, easier to censor, and more efficient,” Edelson says. “Chinese engineers are advancing standards that bring along privacy costs that I think would be unacceptable to most Americans and simply aren’t unacceptable in China and, in fact, are a benefit to the Chinese government.”