Cat and mouse
How China makes sure its internet abides by the rules
cTHE HISTORY OF the internet in China is one of give and take, of punch and counterpunch, where the authorities are often surprised by the force and speed of online interactions but determined to keep them under control. The result has been a costly and diverse industrial complex of monitoring and censorship. Central-government ministries have invested in two pillars of control: the Great Firewall, a Western name for a system of blocking foreign websites, starting in the late 1990s, which some believe has cost as much as $160m (the details are state secrets); and Golden Shield for domestic surveillance and filtering, begun in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security and estimated to have cost more than $1.6 billion so far.
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In addition, a number of black-market internet companies sell services to individuals, including the deletion of negative articles from websites, using connections in government and at the big internet companies, sometimes at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some 60% of the profits of one such company in Beijing, Yage Time Advertising, came from sales to local officials in smaller Chinese cities who wanted to delete negative reports about themselves, according to Caixin, a Chinese financial magazine. The software system for detection and filtering that Yage was offering these officials cost $64,000. Yage was busted by police in July last year, but the unofficial business of deleting posts—and of planting negative ones and of selling “zombie” followers and retweets of posts—continues to flourish.
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