Censorship In China Research Paper

Since the creation of the internet, China has sought to censor “sensitive” information. They have built a powerful firewall to achieve this. Since 1998, China has censored the internet by employing over 30,000 “internet police officers” to patrol the web. Many websites and certain words or phrases are also blocked. For instance, the word “democracy” is blocked because the Chinese government is worried the Chinese people will revolt against the government with pro-democratic ideas found on the internet. Since the firewall was created, the president of China has increased censorship yearly. But this censorship of the internet is hurting foreign corporations in China because their privacy is compromised. This means that no one truly has privacy

Many argue that China’s economy is actually thriving with censorship. This can be seen in the articles seen written by Orlando Crowcroft and Kristie Lu Stout. This is only partially true. China’s domestic economy has been improving with the creations of services like Baidu, the Chinese government’s version of Google. However, with stricter censorship laws, foreign investors are avoiding China. The limitations prove to be to too much for foreign investors to take a chance. These corporations do not want to invest in a country where the freedom of speech is not protected. The rise of China’s domestic economy is balanced with the fall of foreign investment in China. In other words, China is not actually experiencing an economic gain and instead, is slowly hurting with the severe decline in foreign investment over the years. Another counterargument often made is that China’s censoring of the web really works. The government blindly claims that they can censor what the people see and do on the web. This is not true. According to the article by Simon Denyer, the people of China have figured out how to use VPNs (virtual private networks) to bypass censorship. VPNs are private networks that allow you to virtually be in another country. Your location is set to a different country so that you can browse the web with no restrictions. After the government found a way to block those,

China likes to have strict political power when it comes to governing its people. They do not want to expose the people to democratic ideas that would lead them to turn on the government. With the development of VPNS and software, average citizens are getting together to find ways to bypass this obstacle. China taking down the firewall is inevitable. If they do not take it down now, individual hackers would eventually bring it down and cause an uprising against the government. This is why it is in the best interest of the Chinese people and the government, if the firewall would be taken