Harmanpreet Singh

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Posted on 25-05-2010

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If you happen to be in mainland China by chance and search a seemingly harmless word “Huluobo” (Mandarin for carrot!), you would get a plain white blank screen. Mammoth and sophisticated, yet evidently crude at times: the Great Firewall of China.

Internet regulation in China is done by Internet Monitoring and Surveillance units in every city plus three huge firewalls in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Websites, blogs, chatrooms and even text messages are scanned and matched against a list of “sensitive” terms. If found “objectionable, obscene or a threat to stability of the country” you either get a blank screen on your computer or mobile, or search results with descriptions but no hyperlinks to the banned sites. So your quest for more information about “carrot” is censored because in Mandarin, it matches the surname of the Chinese President Hu Jintao. And yes, searching about their political leaders is not allowed. Other so-called “objectionable” content includes the unemployment statistics of the country.

Although it has received severe criticism from human rights activists, the Chinese censorship model is seen by many countries that plan to censor internet as a successful model in place.

This belief stems from the fact that censorship in China is not only about firewalls and scanners.

Read on to know more about "insider" spying and censorship...