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Thursday, October 18, 2007

 

China's Golden Shield


China has been connected to the internet for about twelve years now, yet they still aren’t. What I mean is that the Chinese people are constantly watched and spied on when they are online. Reading the article entitled “China’s Internet Dictatorship” will give you a better sense of this. The Chinese gov’t constantly watches every word that is sent across the internet and blocks or filters search engines. They essentially have erected the Berlin Wall 2.0, except this wall is in China and its digital and not made of stone and brick.

You may think that the Chinese gov’t is behind all this, and they are. But the technology supplied to them to form this shield against the outside world comes from the west, Companies such as Nortel, Cisco, and Sun Microsystems. These companies supply the software and ideas needed to suppress any sense of individuality or revolt on Chinas web. Web sites are shut down very fast and outside web sites are blocked and the Chinese people are put in a position to be fed whatever the gov’t chooses to feed them.

The “Golden Shield” as it is called cost $800 million dollars and is designed to keep the people of China from getting any kind of new information.

“Eleven years after its initial connection to the World Wide Web (WWW), China's access to the Internet is still guarded by firewalls, embedded in its proxy servers, which have proven to be more practical and impenetrable than the Berlin Wall. Moreover, an increase in the demand for broadband connection has triggered the launch of an $800 million "Jin Dun (Golden Shield) Project," an automatic digital system of public policing that will help prolong Communist rule by denying China's people the right to information” (Ma Jain)

I wonder if one day our internet will be like this. If our gov’t will want to have such control over everything we do online. It really is the last free frontier of this country and it can open the flood gates for so many different things both good and bad. It gives the people power and that’s a scary thought when you’re the gov’t governing them. China has a lot of control over its people but I feel one day it will fall. There are always cracks in software and people always find them. As fast as technology is progressing today I believe China will some day soon be open and free, at least internet wise.

posted by S. Colgan @ 12:35 AM permalink
Comments:
A very good post. China is building a wall that cannot last in the long run. However, if they can slow the exchange of ideas they may be able to manage the short term disruptions to their developing economy and emerging civil society. Filtering will limit dissent in the short term.
# posted by Blogger A. Mattson : 11:29 PM
 
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