The People's Republic of China has set up a system of Internet censorship in Mainland China. One part of this system is known outside China as the Great Firewall of China. This system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the internet gateways.
This firewall is largely ineffective at preventing the flow of information and is rather easily circumvented by determined parties by using proxy servers outside the firewall. For a few weeks in year 2002, the Chinese government attempted to block Google, but this block was quickly removed, though some features on Google such as Google Cache remain erratic.
Research into the Chinese internet censorship has shown that blocked websites which include news from many foreign source especially websites which include forums, information about Tibet independence, information about Falun Gong and some websites based in Taiwan.
Although blocking foreign sites has received much attention in the West, this is actually only a part of the Chinese effort to censor the Internet. Much more effective is the ability to censor content providers within China, as the government can physically seize any website and its operators.
Although the government does not have the physical resources to monitor all Internet chat rooms and forums, the threat of being shut down has caused internet content providers to employ internal staff, colloquially known as "big mamas", who stop and remove forum comments which may be politically sensitive.
However, Internet content providers have adopted some counterstrategies. One is to go forth posting political sensitive stories and removing them only when the government complains. In the hours or days in which the story is available online, people read it, and by the time the story is taken down, the information is already public. One notable case in which this occurred was in response to a school explosion in 2001, when local officials tried to suppress the fact the explosion resulted from children illegally producing fireworks. By the time local officials forced the story to be removed from the Internet, the news had already been widely disseminated.
In addition, Internet content providers often replace censored forum comments with white space which allows the reader to know that comments critical of the authorities had been submitted, and often to guess what they must have been.
One controversial issue is whether Western companies should supply equipment to the Chinese government which assists in the blocking of sites. Some argue that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship, while others argue that equipment being supplied is standard Internet infrastructure equipment and that providing this sort of equipment actually aids the flow of information. Without the equipment, the Chinese government would not develop the Internet at all. A similar dilemma faces Western content providers such as Yahoo! and AOL who must abide by Chinese government wishes, including having internal content monitors, in order to be able to operate within China.
It was common in the past to use Google's cache feature to view blocked websites. However, this feature of Google seems to be under some level of blocking, as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites. Currently the block is mostly circumvented by using proxy servers outside the firewall, and is not difficult to carry out for those determined to do so. Some well-known proxy servers have also been blocked.
As Falun Gong websites are generally inaccessible from mainland China, practitioners have launched a company named UltraReach Internet Corp (http://www.ultrareach.com) and developed a software named UltraSurf to enable people in China to access restricted web sites via Internet Explorer without being detected.
Other techniques used include Freenet, a peer-to-peer distributed data store allowing members to anonymously send or retrieve information, and TriangleBoy.
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