The Other Side of the Great Firewall

Here’s a day in the life of an average urban Chinese: Wake up, peer at a Xiaomi smartphone for the morning’s WeChat text and voice messages. Spoon breakfast rice porridge with one hand; with the other, use the phone to order a new air purifier on Taobao, just another purchase in the $2 trillion Chinese e-commerce market. At work, use Baidu’s search engine and check the inbox on email provider 163.com. While slurping a bowl of noodles for lunch, peruse the latest musings of actor Yao Chen, who has over 78 million followers on Weibo. (That’s almost 8 million more than Katy Perry, Twitter’s most popular celebrity.) Choose a restaurant to meet friends for dinner, using Dianping’s recommendations. On the ride home, update a dating profile on Momo and zone out with Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, an online game based on a martial-arts epic.

There are 649 million Chinese online, more than twice the number of people online in the U.S. But they live in a parallel universe that is utterly apart from the rest of the digital world. The tech totems of our era–Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Wikipedia–are forbidden in China, casualties of the ruling Communist Party’s opposition to free expression. A vast system of online censorship, commonly known as the Great Firewall, blocks the populace from viewing material deemed dangerous to the state. Since the advent of the Arab Spring, which underscored for Chinese officials the political power of the Internet, mainland censors have stepped up their work, erasing threats to the party–real and imagined.

Cordoned off by the Great Firewall and largely inhabited by indigenous tech outfits, the Chinese online ecosystem is evolving into the Galápagos of the Internet. But unlike a scattering of rocks in the Pacific Ocean, China is crammed with 1.3 billion people who propel the world’s second largest economy. Even as Beijing detaches its citizens from the global Net, the nation’s native tech firms are thriving. Chinese connect to the Internet through homegrown companies, some of which boast market caps greater than those of the foreign counterparts they are modeled after. Their digital experience matters, both to foreign companies still desperate for a piece of the China market–and contemplating bending their own rules to gain access–and to domestic firms profiting from their absence. “We’re basically living in the world of the Chinese Intranet,” says Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs an Internet and media research outfit focused on China. “The question is, How long can this last? Is this the new normal, or is China going to have to eventually integrate with the world?”

China’s leader, XI Jinping, 61, has made no secret of his ambitions to restore his homeland to greatness. The digital sphere is just one more front in his quest to revitalize China and protect it from Western influence. Last year, after vowing to transform the nation into a “cyberpower,” Xi personally took over leadership of a new committee dedicated to the Internet’s management. Since then, China’s digital landscape has shifted rapidly, and Beijing’s influence has repeatedly reached U.S. shores, where Washington blames Beijing for cyberespionage offensives. Chinese netizens who once sounded off on corruption or pollution–always hot topics in China–have been silenced. Some have even been imprisoned. Rather than camouflage controversial thoughts with pseudonyms, Chinese are now required to unmask themselves on social media. With imprisonment threatened for “online rumormongering,” the use of Weibo’s Twitter-like microblogs to uncover scandal has waned. “What we’re seeing now is a large-scale offensive that’s comprehensive and well coordinated” says Yang Guobin, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Power of the Internet in China.

At least 2 million Chinese toil as online censors, according to state media. Virtual private networks–foreign-operated servers long used to access sites blocked by the Chinese government–have come under open attack. Last year, Gmail was totally blocked for the first time ever. Then Microsoft’s Outlook email service in China was hacked. Communications to and from China, always slightly unreliable, turned erratic. Far from denying responsibility for such outages, Lu Wei, China’s Internet czar who runs the Cyberspace Affairs Administration, which was formed during Xi’s tenure, defended the changes. “The Internet is like a car,” said Lu, who once served as a top propaganda official in Beijing. “If it has no brakes, it doesn’t matter how fast the car is capable of traveling. Once it gets on the highway you can imagine what the end result will be.”

For many chinese, though, the Internet behind the Great Firewall works just fine, delivering goods, services and cat videos with a swipe of a smartphone. If a user sticks to Chinese sites, the speed can be plenty fast and the price for access cheaper than in the U.S. China’s IT and communications market will be worth $465 billion this year, according to market-intelligence firm IDC–40% of total global growth. By 2018, Morgan Stanley estimates, more online transactions will occur in China than in the rest of the world combined.

They may not yet be household names, but in September, e-commerce king Alibaba scored the largest IPO in Wall Street history. The company’s online marketplace, Taobao, serviced by the Alipay payment system, outsells Amazon and eBay combined. Tencent, Alibaba’s rival and designer of games and messaging service WeChat, reached a market cap of $185 billion, more than IBM’s. After its latest round of funding in December, Xiaomi was valued at some $45 billion, making it the world’s most valuable tech startup.

The realities of China’s market pose a dilemma for foreign tech firms: Companies whose reputations depend on privacy rights and the free flow of information don’t appreciate restrictions imposed by any government. Yet what publicly traded company would do right by shareholders by ignoring the largest tech consumer market on earth? Already tech companies have tweaked offerings to accommodate various national laws, and that can have global implications. “Anytime a company invests resources in building the capacity to censor content, then it can be applied in other places,” says Ryan Budish, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It makes other governments wonder, Budish says, “oh, well, why couldn’t they do it for us?”

Facebook, blocked in China in 2009 after riots in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, hasn’t given up. The company makes do selling ad space to Chinese companies wanting to market themselves abroad. “Our current business focus is to study and learn about China,” says a Facebook spokesman.

Mark Zuckerberg is doing just that, in notably public fashion. In December, Zuckerberg hosted Internet regulator Lu at his office. The founder of a social network that has connected 1.35 billion active users worldwide–roughly the same number as China’s entire population–posed for smiling photos with the man who has overseen Beijing’s renewed assault on Internet freedom. Just to make the message extra clear, a copy of President Xi’s collected speeches–hardly scintillating reading–happened to be sitting on Zuckerberg’s desk when Lu visited. Will the charm campaign pay off? “If you think of the Chinese government’s litmus test for accepting foreign tech firms, Facebook is pretty socially corrosive,” says Duncan Clark, founder of BDA China, a tech consultancy in Beijing. “I don’t really see how Facebook can square the circle.”

In the infancy of the Internet, optimists imagined that free information would flood across national boundaries, perhaps even catalyzing democratic reform in societies under authoritarian rule. China has proved both notions wrong. The Communist Party is firmly in control, just as it was in the earliest days of the web. “Do Chinese like being cut off from Facebook?” asks Rogier Creemers, a scholar of Chinese media at the University of Oxford. “Absolutely not. But does that mean they’re seeking liberation from the Chinese state? I have my doubts.”

But Charlie Smith, a co-founder of GreatFire.org, which monitors and circumvents Chinese filters, sees it another way. (His name is a pseudonym used to protect the sensitive work he does.) “Saying that Chinese don’t really care about whether or not they can access information,” Smith says, “is like saying that they are second-class information citizens and they don’t deserve it anyway.” It’s also true that the inconveniences of Xi’s Internet crackdown aren’t limited to dissident types. Google fonts, Twitter embeds and Facebook links are widespread across the Internet, meaning that even if web pages aren’t censored in China, they tend to load much more slowly because of these foreign trimmings. Gmail blockages have affected everyone from factory owners filling overseas orders and students applying to U.S. colleges to scientists trying to access international research.

Nor is China’s Internet strategy simply a domestic one. U.S. officials have accused Chinese state-backed hackers of stealing American online records. On June 4, it was revealed that hackers accessed the personal data of at least 4 million current and former U.S. government employees–an attack that U.S. investigators said appeared to originate in China. (A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman called the accusations “irresponsible” and said China is also a victim of hacking.)

Beyond allegations of cyberespionage, there are other ways in which China appears determined to extend online barricades beyond its national boundaries. In April, a report from the influential Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto described an offensive cyberblast dubbed “the Great Cannon,” which redirects traffic from Chinese sites like search engine Baidu to foreign websites like GreatFire.org that have helped Chinese circumvent their government. The Great Cannon is designed to crash those foreign websites by overloading them with traffic.

China’s defenders say proposed rules to enhance state authority over the Internet are like antiterrorism laws and are no different from those that allow the U.S. government to spy on its citizens. U.S. officials are pushing for even more potential access to the encrypted data American tech firms collect. Beijing contends that China is simply strengthening cybersecurity in the post–Edward Snowden era. “I can choose who will be a guest in my home,” Internet czar Lu said last year.

President xi has made it clear that he wants to build an “innovation society,” with strong Chinese tech firms that can compete internationally. Some of those companies have already made inroads abroad. Telecom giant Huawei was stymied in its efforts to sell networking equipment in the U.S. after a congressional report labeled the company a national-security threat. But more than 65% of Huawei’s revenue comes from overseas, with the company succeeding not just in the developing world but in Europe as well. The firm, founded by a former People’s Liberation Army officer, is rolling out smartphones and wearable technology in the U.S. Xiaomi aims to flood developing-world countries with affordable alternatives to Samsung and Apple devices. The smartphonemaker has begun selling power banks, headphones and fitness bands in U.S. and European online stores. Tencent claims that more than 100 million people outside China, many of whom are ethnic Chinese, use its WeChat messaging service despite concerns that its chats are subject to Chinese filters.

Still, even Wen Ku, the top telecom official at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, admitted this year that many Chinese Internet firms have thrived because of “a good policy environment”–one in which they did not have to contend with foreign challengers. It’s telling that while Baidu may control 80% of the domestic search-engine market, two of its engineers say privately that given a choice, they would use Google instead of their employer’s censored service. (Baidu, for example, excludes most references to the June 4, 1989, massacre from search results for Tiananmen Square.) “If you simply block the competitors, this is not the right way for China to be innovative,” says Cassandra Wang, who studies Chinese IT innovation at Zhejiang University in eastern China.

China could be doing so much more online. A want ad for a job as an assistant monitor (as censors are known) for Sina, the portal that runs the biggest Weibo service, sets high standards: a bachelor’s degree, strong English skills, at least one year’s experience in online monitoring and an “enthusiastic and passionate” personality. What if an army of eager college graduates were used for more creative pursuits? “Imagine the innovation that could be coming out of China,” says GreatFire.org’s Smith. “That’s what the Internet could do.” For China, and the world.

–With reporting by GU YONGQIANG/BEIJING, VICTOR LUCKERSON/NEW YORK CITY and SAM FRIZELL/WASHINGTON