Title: How does China censor the internet? | The Economist
Headings: How does China censor the internet?
The Economist explains
How does China censor the internet?
Content: How does China censor the internet? | The Economist
The Economist explains
How does China censor the internet? With both the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield
Explaining the world, daily
The Economist explains
Apr 22nd 2013
by E.H.
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THE first e-mail sent from China, on September 14th 1987, was optimistic: " Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world." Few of China's 560m internet users now have such reach, however, because China tightly controls its people's use of the internet. The "Freedom on the Net 2012" report, issued by Freedom House, an American organisation that tracks global trends in political freedom, ranked China as the third most restrictive country in the world when it comes to internet access, after Iran and Cuba (though this ranking excludes those places, such as North Korea, where ordinary people are not allowed to use the internet at all). How does China censor the internet? The Chinese central government has two main ways of controlling what its citizens see on the web: the Great Firewall, as it is called by foreigners, which is a system of limiting access to foreign websites which started in the late 1990s, and the Golden Shield, a system for domestic surveillance set up in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security. Separate government departments, along with local and provincial administrations, also have their own monitoring systems.