The Great Firewall of China Project Started

As China ushered into the age of the Internet, the Great Firewall project was launched by the Chinese government and executed in mainland China in 1998, designed to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic by IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering and other methods. It functions in three ways: a) limiting access to foreign information sources and foreign internet services including Google search, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, and most academic database; b) forcing foreign internet companies to adjust into China’s policy and censorship on the internet, which brought Google’s quit from China’s market in 2010; c) nurturing domestic companies and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.

Denyer, Simon. 2016. “China’s Scary Lesson to the World: Censoring the Internet Works.” Washington Post, May 23, 2016, sec. Asia & Pacific. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-scary-lesson-to-the-world-censoring-the-internet-works/2016/05/23/413afe78-fff3-11e5-8bb1-f124a43f84dc_story.html.

Mozur, Paul. 2015. “Baidu and CloudFlare Boost Users Over China’s Great Firewall.” The New York Times, September 13, 2015, sec. Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/business/partnership-boosts-users-over-chinas-great-firewall.html.

“Technical Appendix - Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China.” n.d. Accessed April 14, 2018. https://cyber.harvard.edu/filtering/china/appendix-tech.html.