As a part of the Golden Shield Project, the Great Firewall of China was first operated in 2013 by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) in cooperation with the Communist Party, and just after Xi Jinping became a president in 2012.

There were clear intentions to the president to lead the country towards more tightening and restricting censorship. First implicated in the opening ceremony of the second World Internet Conference, when he clearly stated that each country has the right to impose its own regulations in terms of censorship, and called it “Internal affairs,” that should not be limited or controlled by any other parties.

Huge efforts have been devoted to this specific purpose. To the Chinese people, a similar announcement wasn’t very surprising since the restrictions were already imposed a long time before the Great Firewall of China came to the scene. However, the project’s release has made it a fait accompli and left nothing to be said or discussed.

According to Theguardian.com, about 70% of 300 Chinese officials were anxious about their private life on the internet might be monitored, leaked or collected, That’s one reason why most of the Chinese citizens have been using the virtual private network to surf the web anonymously and without risking their information. But, unfortunately, VPN services have also been limited due to the Great Firewall of China’s censorship.

But the question is: Why does the Chinese government impose such restrictions on web content? Of course, politics come in the first place, besides some other reasons that we’ll discuss below.

What’s Behind the Great Firewall of China?

As for Xi Jinping, the impact of the protests and petitions that take place over the internet have the same impact as the physical protests on the ground, and both are seen as threatening acts to the Chinese national security. Xi’s vision led to the implementation of more restrictive laws to the authorized content on the internet.

To tighten citizens’ freedom, even more, the Chinese government have developed new technologies that banned and blocked the majority of VPN services in China, which left no outlet for the Chinese people to practice their civil rights as free individuals, besides punishing those who defeated the restrictions and had opposing opinions towards them.

The development of such surveilling restrictions started in 1990 by Fang Binxing, who worked on developing the Golden Shield Project, which enabled the Chinese government to monitor all the received and sent data and blocked the unwanted IP addresses and domain names. Since then, Chinese people have been struggling with their limited online being.

The Chinese government claimed that the development of the Golden Shield project should protect national security and bring political unity.

Another reason why China has blocked international websites and applications, such as Google’s blocking in the mid-2000s, Facebook in 2009, and Twitter in 2008, is to give an opportunity for domestic websites and applications to step forth, especially that it would have been hard for those domestic websites to compete against their international counterparts.

How Does It Impose Similar Censorship?

You’ll never know what lies beneath the Great Firewall of China since it doesn’t reveal particular or transparent censorship. Instead, you may face issues that appear as common technical issues with the network or error messages that usually occur when you can’t reach the destination IP address. So, it never tells you that you can’t access a website or a source because of the Great Firewall of China. However, there are some tricks that China may have used to restrict the web content. Let’s mention some of them: (Source: Several.com):

• Blocking certain IP addresses: By blocking the IP address of the website’s servers, China could block a lot of the websites like Twitter, for example, this should also result in blocking any other websites in the same region if they share the server.

• Trick the DNS: When you try to connect to a website, the DNS finds the IP address over the web and connects you to the website associated with that specific IP address, but what the Chinese government does is redirect you to the wrong IP address, which leads to the internet user receiving an error message that the website is not available or invalid response.

• Filtering the URLs: The Great Firewall of China can detect sensitive keywords in the URL and block them accordingly.

• Inspecting data packets: Similar to the way it deals with URLs, unencrypted data packets are inspected to find any sensitive keywords that indicate certain content types, for example, if a data packet shows that the content is about sensitive political issues, the Great Firewall of China blocks it immediately.

• Blocking VPNs: As we said earlier, Chinese citizens installed a VPN service on their devices to go around the geo-restriction. However, the Great Firewall of China has become more sophisticated than ever and could block the majority of VPN services in China. Still, some VPN services can go around the Great Firewall of China’s censorship. Read more about the best VPN service in China.

In a nutshell, it seems that the Chinese government has been preparing for similar surveillance a long time ago and had already taken restricted censorship before the deployment of the Great Firewall of China. As for the Chinese citizens, it is not easy to overcome the high censorship of the Chinese government, but they still can enjoy full internet access to the internet using the right VPN service.