Information Society Watch

November 12, 2007, Mure Dickie, Financial Times

This article reports on the the double-edged of growing Internet use in China. As China first got online, some heralded the Internet as a breakthrough to toppling China's regime of government censorship, but instead the state has proven very effective at using state and commercial resources to prevent citizens from using the Internet as a tool for political dissent. The Communist party has instituted the Great Firewall of China to filter and block any potentially anti-state content from foreign sites, and it has appropriated new digital technologies as tools for increased surveillance and publishing propaganda. The success and opacity of China's political censors has many implications for the mulitinational corporations and Western governments who may even be funding the local enterprises that contribute to such censorship. The article speculates that perhaps the state is trying to give a competitive edge to Chinese websites, but this would not explain the fact that mostly local language content and not english material is being filtered.

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