On September 14th, 1987 the first email was sent from The People’s Republic of China to a prestige university in Germany, it was an enormous step forward to technology and international communications, this event marked the start of a new era of innovations within internet, but currently this advance was stopped and restrained on China. Internet since its beginnings until now is an outstanding tool, while having a connection to internet you can find a vast variety of activities to do, find entertainment, learn new things, interact with people all around the world or express yourself through social media, among others. Internet can be great to execute the mentioned actions but, many internet users also have a bad usage of this facility and observing the danger this mean could induce to China’s population Chinese government decided to apply a censorship policy on the internet. Nowadays in all China’s internet population, that is approximately 560 million users, only few percentage have a full access to the internet, consequence of the China’s internet censorship. This report’s goal is to explain briefly the cause of the implementation, the effects on the population, what does the policy censor and how does it work.
WHY CHINA IMPLEMENTS THE CENSORSHIP POLICY
China’s internet censorship policy was founded by the Chinese Communist Party and it had two main purposes, ban any opposition or criticism to communism among Chinese on internet and avoid the use of tools made by West, who represent capitalism and its ideologies.
Communist ideologies are the basis of this policy, and this ideology totally rejects West and its capitalism, regarding this, China is against using any western related tool. In this country most of the western, more known, research and social media platforms are banned. Taking this in advantage, China creates own social media platforms and research pages. They do not only avoid capitalism by creating this tools, but also Chinese government is able to have total control over the platforms, gaining the ability to censor any post that violate the purpose of the policy, that is to remove the criticism toward communist party ideas or governmental management.
WHAT DOES THE POLICY CENSOR
The policy states that the circulation of information that contains content that could corrupt the power of the state or infringe a lack of respect to the nation or the communist party is prohibit, and any web site, blog or post on social media that seem to infringe the rule would be instantly blocked.
But lately, studies have shown that the government censors more the humane expression than the negative comments toward the state. The program is being accused for aiming to limit the collective actions by blocking the posts that encourage social movements, regardless the content. These accusations resemble a threat to the government’s program, because the project is not being used for the purposes that had been predetermined and as such, seems to expose the government’s intent of having controlled and with a monotone thinking the society. So in consequence of this, there is no clarity to know what does the government censures or not.
HOW DOES THE CENSORSHIP WORK
Chinese government has implemented a unique way of censoring the web: the Great Firewall of China officially named the Golden Shield project. This internet barrier is considered the largest, more developed and most advanced Internet censorship regime in the world. It is a system that is constructed to limit access to foreign websites that violate the conditions stablished by the government. “This barrier controls the Internet gateways where traffic travels between China and the rest of the web by a combination of firewalls and proxy servers.” Taken from https://www.howtogeek.com/162092/htg-explains-how-the-great-firewall-of-china-works/
HOW DOES THE POLICY AFECT THE USERS
There are many problems within the policy and the users; this includes the violation of some human rights and the excluding of China’s population from the rest of the world, among others.
In the Chinese constitution is stated that people of China have the freedom of speech and the expression of ideas, but with the censorship the government has the authority to silence anything that could potentially damage the country. So if you want to say something the government doesn’t approve others can’t hear it, especially in the network. This resumes that in China you are free to speak only about what the government says is correct to speak. Censorship also makes people believe the wrong facts, sheltering people from the reality. If the government does not want the society know something they can just simply censor it, and no one would know what could happen.
CONCLUSION
Chinese government’s intention with the Golden Shield Project is unknown, but its society has the commitment of following the rules, even if the community is against, their opinion won’t be so valid for the government and the only possible action they could do is censor the comment. So, although censorship will help the society in some way, it will also lead society to a wrong way.