During Mao Zedong's rule, you could be detained for discussing your cat (as the academic Perry Link noted, the word is a near homonym for the Great Leader's name). This no longer happens in China. Instead, the government has developed an armoury of tools to monitor, classify and repress the behaviour of 1.4 billion people. The internet has become a focal point for the state's gaze; cyber sensors suspend social media accounts, search terms are blocked and sites such as Google and Twitter are inaccessible.
The Communist Party has made no secret of this. But attacks on internet freedom are not limited to China, as James Griffiths writes in his new book. Internet blackouts pioneered in China are now a preferred tool among dictators. China has advised Russia on internet filtering, and Russia has enlisted the Chinese company Huawei to build the hardware for a controversial bill that expands internet surveillance.
Yet while citizens in the United States and elsewhere have access to a greater array of websites, they are no less monitored. Google is reportedly designing a search app, Dragonfly, that will be compatible with China's censorship provisions, while the multinational Cisco supplied filtering technology to China's censors in the early 1990s. The UK, too, is in on the game. At a 2017 trade fair in Shenzhen, an executive from CCTVdirect, a British company, lamented “how far behind” Western countries were. “What starts here [in China] ends up in homes, airports and businesses back in America,” he said.
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