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Using the internet in the People's Republic of China
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The Register
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Our man reports from inside the Great Firewall
By Bill Ray
China makes no secret of its desire, and ability, to
control internet access, but even at a glance it's clear
that the Great Firewall Of China leaks like the
proverbial sieve.
We had the chance to try our hand at breaching that wall
on a recent trip to visit Huawei in Shenzhen. Our hosts
kindly supplied us with China Mobile SIMs for data
access so we could see the internet as the Chinese see
it, and we managed to test out wi-fi connectivity at a
local hotel with similar results - only the hotel wi-fi
didn't kick us off entirely for asking the wrong
questions.
Cisco provides the racks of servers used by the Chinese
government to monitor, and block, access to specific
services and information. Unsurprisingly the system is
easy for the technically literate to circumnavigate, if
we'd been using a UK SIM then our traffic would be
routed via the UK operator and thus past the firewall.
Even without paying ruinous roaming rates it's not
difficult to do most things, though the blocks still
crop up often enough to irritate if one is used to
unfettered internet access.
Social networking?
Ah, you mean QQ [1]
The blocking is almost entirely HTTP related – specific
websites are disallowed on the basis of their URL. That
includes services such as Facebook and Twitter, but only
the websites; the westerner travelling in China will
have no problem using app clients out widgets over hotel
Wi-Fi and cellular, though the Twitter (SMS) short code
won't forward.
The same rules apply to email. Encrypted IMAP works
fine, and GMail continues to synchronise with it's
Android (our similar) client, but try accessing any part
of GMail, or any GMail-hosted service (such as the El
Reg mailboxes), on a browser and the chocolate factory's
email service is permanently off line.
Attempting to load any of the prohibited web sites
results in a site not found error, just as if one had
mistyped the address or Twitter.com just didn't exist.
Locals were aware of the blocks, but didn't consider it
remarkable and simply pointed out that all countries
block content of they find socially unacceptable, it's
just a matter of where the lines are drawn.
More interesting were the results of a contentious
search. Google's URL forwards to Hong Kong from China,
and mostly works, but search for "Tiananmen Square" and
suddenly the cellular connection drops out entirely and
has to be reconnected, not a browser error but a
disconnected data session. Spell "tanaminm" badly enough
and the firewall will miss it, but Google will correct
the spelling and return the search results. That's not
very useful, as clicking on any of the pertinent ones
will result in the "site not found" error popping up
again.
Your mobile data connection may be affected
After performing several such searches our cellular
connection started playing up quite badly, dropping out
at random and requiring a complete power cycle of the
dongle before we could reconnect. There's no way to tell
if that was down to our activities, or unrelated, but
one did follow the other.
Tiananmen what?
China reckons that its site-blocking is no different
than our own attempts to block sites hosting child
pornography, albeit on a larger scale. But the
comparison isn't really fair – at least not yet. We
block child pornography because of the harm its
production does to children, but moves are afoot to
widen the UK's own firewall, and if that's allowed to
happen then it becomes harder to attack China's on
ideological grounds.
Using the internet in China you might never be aware of
the blocking in place, and with a minimum of effort the
visitor can participate in most online activities
without significant impediment. The decision to block
services that can't be controlled, such as Twitter, has
been enormously helpful to domestic versions and is
increasingly looking like a trade barrier. In response
to such an accusation the Chinese declare themselves
happy to have Twitter locally just as soon as the
company agrees to implement suitable censorship
measures, and Facebook is rumoured to be about to launch
a localised (and censored) version.
One could argue that using spurious national-security
arguments to impose an unreasonable burden on foreign
companies to the benefit of local competition is no
different than what the US senators tried to do [2]. Had
the congressmen succeeded in requiring operators to
report all Huawei and ZTE kit used in critical
locations, it would have been of a huge benefit to
companies not in China. The difference, of course, is
that the move failed, while in China domestic versions
of Twitter and YouTube are thriving. ®
Links
http://www.qq.com/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/02/zte_fcc/ |
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