James Griffiths is a producer for CNN International in Hong Kong and author of The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet (2019), which explores how China developed the world’s most sophisticated online censorship system and was released in Chinese on June 4 (游擊文化). He was previously an editor at the South China Morning Post, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic and the Daily Beast. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Illustration by Lauren Crow
China’s internet is heavily censored in terms of access to taboo topics like the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but you argue in your book that what most people overlook is how China’s “Great Firewall” is more about preventing solidarity and organization. Can you explain why that distinction matters so much?
A lot of the conversation around internet censorship gets lost in the weeds of talking about individual pieces of content. That misses the point of what the Firewall is. It does block a lot of information, and it does block a lot of websites, but that will never be 100 percent effective. And it doesn’t need to be effective, because what it does block almost 100 percent of the time is people being able to act on that information and organize around it and use that kind of information or organizing to effect social change.
If you can stop that process, it doesn’t matter as much what information people are exposed to. You can cope with the Firewall having a few holes in it from VPNs [Virtual Private Networks, which allow users to route to the internet through a private server], or just from websites going unnoticed, or people smuggling information through. You can cope with that so long as you can stop organizing and stop people spreading solidarity among various oppressed groups — you can stop that the moment it starts to surface.
Unfortunately for activists and civil society groups, that moment needs to surface, because there’s no way you build a mass movement and build solidarity across various classes and groups without it and without, at some point, exposing yourself to the government.
BIO AT A GLANCE | |
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AGE | 32 |
BIRTHPLACE | North Wales |
CURRENT JOB | Senior Producer at CNN International |
EDUCATION | University of Liverpool |
FUN FACT | Welsh speaker, writing a book about the politics of language |
The ability to organize has been put to the test recently during the Covid-19 lockdowns in mainland China, and the protests in Hong Kong. Let’s start with Covid-19. During the lockdowns, it seemed for a moment that large numbers of people in China were taking to the internet to share their experiences, but then this stopped. What happened?
The Communist Party was taken aback slightly during the coronavirus crisis, because it was a very unique crisis. In the beginning, before a lot of what had gone on in Wuhan and what responsibility the authorities might have [came out], it wasn’t clear that the virus would be turned around and used to criticize the government. So it makes sense that there was a slight relaxing on what people could discuss; they were allowing people to share in the national conversation and the national trauma. That helps pull people together — and we saw this as the Chinese people used “Go Wuhan” [ 武汉加油] as a kind of rallying cry.
But that shifted as some of the more negative information started to come out about just how badly officials seemed to have handled the early stages. It was so interesting to see the Chinese authorities react in real time to a brand-new crisis that didn’t fit the familiar model for them. There was a little bit of knee-jerk censorship, which makes sense because that’s the first instinct, and then they really screwed up when there was this very naked attempt to massage the death of Dr. Li Wenliang [the early whistleblower who died of Covid-19 at the age of 33]. His death was announced, and then it was not announced — it got really confusing, and you could just see this was the authorities trying to control how it came out. And that led to a backlash.
After Dr. Li’s death, calls for freedom of speech emerged across the Chinese internet. Was this a short-lived moment? Or do you think it’s something that will rear its head again?
I think we’re already past it. Ultimately, the [censorship] system is both stable enough and flexible enough to react to this. There were a couple of days when it looked kind of embarrassing because [the government] bungled the initial death announcement, and there was a lot of anger, but they got that under control very quickly.
Li Wenliang has already been thoroughly co-opted by the government. He was declared a hero of the people; he was given a medal; he was one of a number of doctors who died tackling the coronavirus who has been officially recognized. He fits a certain model of the good local citizen, battling against incompetent or corrupt or overly bureaucratic local officials, rather than the national government. Before his death, Li Wenliang didn’t criticize the Communist Party — he wasn’t saying “this is a problem with the whole Chinese system” — so it was easier for the authorities to pivot and blame the local officials. If there’s a lot of public anger, it’s easier [for the censors] to find a scapegoat and throw them under the bus rather than trying to suppress everything.
What about in Hong Kong? Protests there are largely being organized through online forums and over encrypted apps. What does Beijing’s recent national security legislation mean for this type of organizing?
Those of us that live here are still very much trying to get our heads around what the national security law means, both in how it will be rolled out and how it will come into effect. The biggest red line was always Article 23 [the statute that requires the Hong Kong government to enact its own national security law], and Beijing has blasted straight through that. So the idea that Beijing wouldn’t try to introduce some kind of internet censorship down the line should probably be reappraised — it’s probably very likely.
And I there will absolutely be an effort to block certain services once the national security bill is passed. There already was a discussion among Hong Kong lawmakers about trying to block Telegram [an encrypted messaging app] or trying to block LIHKG [Hong Kong’s version of Reddit] last year because of how involved they were in organizing the protests. The national security law gives the police and the authorities much more justification for doing that.
It’s very easy to say they want to block these services, but actually being able to do that is a lot harder. The instructive model recently is Russia, which went through an absolute nightmare trying to block Telegram in 2018. Telegram is deliberately built to be anti-censorship; it can very easily reroute itself to other servers. So, you end up in this kind of cat and mouse game of trying to block all the servers it pushes itself through. Russia ended up going after Amazon Web Services, which had a massive negative effect on a whole host of other websites. So, Telegram and WhatsApp could be very difficult for the Chinese authorities to block.

Credit: Wongan4614, Creative Commons
Should multinational companies in Hong Kong be operating as if the Chinese government has access to their systems?
Companies that have any connection with China should already be acting as if the Chinese state, defined in the broadest sense, could have access to their data if it wants it. But it would be a major concern for international businesses here if, just on a technical level, the way that Hong Kong connects to the internet was changed to be in line with the Chinese model.
To explain that: in the most simple sense the Great Firewall works because China can control all the borders of its domestic internet, whereas Hong Kong connects through various underwater cables and various other connections through other countries, many of which are operated by private entities, although some are operated by government-backed entities. There is slightly more confidence that Hong Kong’s communications are harder to tap. But if there was an introduction of a firewall, it would change how Hong Kong connects to the internet, full stop. That would introduce the opportunity for surveillance, which might make international companies a little wary.
Since the law was announced, a bunch of VPN companies have said they’ve seen demand from Hong Kong spiking through the roof from people trying to get prepared for [the national security law]. It comes down to how serious the authorities want to be about going after those services, and that’s when you start having to think about something more akin to the Great Firewall if [the Chinese government wants to censor certain websites] rather than just making them one step more difficult to access.
How does the Great Firewall approach the VPN issue now? It seems pretty easy to jump the Firewall, but I haven’t seen a widespread desire to. Is that true?
Ultimately, it isn’t that difficult to jump the Firewall. Anyone who has gone to China has installed a VPN. It’s kind of a pain to use because you have to turn it on and log into it and sometimes it slows your internet down. But it’s not so complicated; it’s just running a program.
There are two factors working against widespread VPN use in China. One is that most people don’t need it. The Chinese internet is perfectly good as a consumer internet. It used to be that, when we talked about China, we said it had its own versions of Facebook and Twitter. But now, in the West, we are using China’s biggest social networking app: TikTok. One of the most popular apps in the West now is something Chinese people had before everyone outside of the Firewall did. There is plenty of entertainment and normal life on the Chinese internet, so most people don’t feel a need to jump the Firewall.
Also, there’s enough of a barrier, both in terms of difficulty and potential legal costs. The potential negative costs, including prosecutions, have been increasing over the years. They’re also going after anyone providing VPNs in China. We’ve seen various providers arrested, and we’ve seen VPNs being used as a marker of suspicion. Potentially the most draconian way that it has reared its head is in Xinjiang [where the Chinese government heavily surveils the Uighur minority population], where there are regular searches of people’s phones. If you have a VPN installed, it can be a cause for suspicion and the police can then drag you in and arrest you and look more thoroughly at what you’re doing.
While there isn’t that level of policing in most of China yet, the awareness that having this or that app could get you in trouble is definitely there. If you don’t need a VPN for 99 percent of what you want to do on the internet, and a VPN could get you dragged down to the police station for a really horrible afternoon of questioning or even arrest, that’s enough to prevent most people from using it.
Let’s zoom out to how China is approaching the internet outside its borders. You’ve written that China is pushing for new international norms for the internet. What does this look like?
A lot of people, myself included when I started reporting in this area, don’t realize just how much the internet is governed by various international, governmental, and industry bodies — like the UN International Telecommunications Union [ITU] or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN]. They set standards, discuss rules, and discuss norms. A lot of the time, this is fairly innocuous; it has to do with nitty gritty technological things like what spectrums are used and what connectivity standards are used. But sometimes it can be much more impactful on how ordinary people use the internet.
The ITU is the perfect example of this. The UN body was designed primarily as a technical forum, for setting standards and communications protocols to enable international telecoms to function more smoothly. But there has been a push in recent years to grant it more and more power over the internet. Because of the way the body functions, this would give states a greater say in global internet norms and regulation, without the input of civil society groups or industry, which have traditionally served as a backstop against moves towards greater censorship.
There has been a concerted push by China, for example, not so much to push negative rules like outright censorship, but to get rid of certain human rights protections that have been the norm for a long time. We know from the records of discussions at the UN and media reports that Chinese diplomats have worked to remove phrases like “freedom of expression” and “democratic” from treaties relating to the internet, and introduce “multilateral” in place of “multi stakeholder,” in order to empower states at the expense of civil society groups. China argues that these are technical matters and these various bodies shouldn’t be discussing these things.
Why is China doing this? Do they want the international stamp of approval on their Firewall?
Frankly, China doesn’t care what the international community thinks about what it does within its own borders. It’s more about making systems like the Great Firewall more of a norm for the rest of the world. The Great Firewall is a more attractive model of Internet control than many people would like to admit, including for many democracies. China’s system of censorship has been cited by everyone from Bono to Joe Lieberman when advancing their own arguments for controlling online content. And, in the wake of concerns over fake news and online influence campaigns, we’ve seen multiple countries use this as an excuse to advance internet controls. The prime example here is Singapore, which passed a fake news law that has already been used to go after government criticism online. If China’s model becomes more widespread, it’s much harder for other countries to push back, and it’s much harder for big technology firms to argue against operating in China.
So, China is trying to set the norms for what countries can do within their own borders. China’s doctrine of cyber-sovereignty argues that the web is not a unique technology, transcending borders and international controls, but that it is like everything else and should be regulated accordingly. We have border controls and import duties in the physical world, so why should the digital sphere be any different? This theoretical underpinning of the Great Firewall has been advanced very aggressively by China in recent years at these types of international bodies. You’ll see language in support of “internet sovereignty” getting put into declarations at ITU. Or you’ll see efforts to put Chinese companies and Chinese officials in positions of influence where they might be able to shape the norms and standards for future internet technology 10 or 20 years down the line.
Standards bodies, after all, are largely dominated by the biggest industry players. In the past this was U.S. companies like Cisco, but increasingly this is Chinese firms such as Huawei, Alibaba or ZTE. Obviously these companies have an important role to play in global telecoms, given their stature and market share, but the concern is that — especially as the Party pushes for more control over big tech firms — this will be a backdoor to advance Beijing’s doctrine of internet sovereignty and push back on efforts to promote free speech online.
MISCELLANEA | |
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FAVORITE MUSIC | Kanye West |
FAVORITE FILM | The Farewell (2019) |
RECENTLY READ | Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker |
HOBBIES | Hiking, baking |
So, China is trying to be a global leader for internet services and also internet norms. Isn’t that surprising given how their attempts to censor the internet were originally received?
It’s hard to remember now, but in the 90s and even into the early 2000s, people would say censorship doesn’t work on the internet. There’s a famous quote from John Gilmore about how “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” But every day, the Great Firewall was this example that actually, you can totally do this, and it’s relatively easy. As China developed this really thriving internet ecosystem, you can point out that not only is it easy, but you can be financially successful while doing it. So, since its genesis, the Great Firewall has been an influence in other countries because it is the ultimate example that you can censor and control the internet.
The original Firewall, by the way, was built using U.S. bricks. The Firewall was mainly built by Cisco. It wasn’t technically super sophisticated. It wasn’t like they were crafting special technologies for the Chinese to use — it was more like the kind of firewall options that existed for any kind of business router or switches. They just turned them on for the whole country.
Increasingly, as the Chinese telecom sector has evolved, all this stuff has been switched out for domestic stuff. It’s nearly all made by Huawei and other Chinese companies now. This follows a pattern of China using foreign technology when it’s the most advanced, but rushing to replace it with more trustworthy domestic versions as soon as it can.
In more recent decades, as both software and hardware Chinese companies have become more successful and become serious players in their respective spheres, they have increasingly marketed their technologies to countries around the world. So, you’ll see Huawei is incredibly involved and invested in much of Africa. The various Chinese telecom giants are always happy to help build out internet backbones and internet services around the world. Not so much is happening on the consumer side for software because there has been a real struggle for a lot of apps like WeChat to take off in other parts of the world. But certainly, the more sinister software surveillance — stuff that’s geared at police departments and security services — those companies are very, very active and marketing themselves to authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments around the world.
You see China’s influence increasing in that regard in the private sphere. That is backed up and supported, sometimes very aggressively, by the Chinese government, which encourages allies and encourages countries within its sphere of influence to adopt these technologies and sometimes even offers to help them craft internet policy or provide its own laws as a model for them.
What does that mean for the United States, which has been the leading power of the internet so far?
The U.S. position as the leading internet power is largely the result of much of the technology being invented in the U.S. and the companies that were involved being based in the U.S. There has always been a discomfort among much of the world that the U.S. has this outsized power over the internet. At a very technical level, the U.S. has certain powers to block websites and cut off access that other countries simply do not have, just because of the way the technology is structured. The European Union has pushed the U.S. for a number of years on trying to internationalize the system, making it more akin to other kinds of international governance systems.
But the problem with internationalizing these things is that is very much the approach that China and other very aggressive internet censors want to follow. Once you’ve internationalized something, once you make a government to government system, you suddenly realize that the majority of the governments who have a say in regulation, in future governance and future policy, are either openly authoritarian or are very hostile towards the free and open Internet. So, you end up in this awkward situation where people who want to defend open access and want to defend free speech online end up supporting U.S. hegemony over a lot of these areas. It’s kind of a “the devil you know” situation.
That’s not to say the U.S. is perfect in terms of surveillance and also in terms of its own issues with regulating certain companies. The concerns about the U.S., especially when we’re talking about surveillance, would exist regardless of whether the U.S. maintained its position as a leading Internet power, and the potential downsides of removing the U.S. from that position would be much greater.
Is there any hope for a “freer” internet in China? How do we know there’s not going to be some new technology tomorrow that will be impossible for the Chinese government to control?
The idea of a technological solution to censorship has been a long sought-after dream. This is the ideology of a lot of the early Silicon Valley pioneers and the techno-libertarians. I don’t think we can say that there won’t be some magical solution that could come along in the future. But what we can say is, so far, the Chinese government has managed to stay at least one, if not two or three steps ahead of everyone trying to undermine it.
It’s important to say that the biggest examples of technological advances don’t necessarily benefit individuals and the people working against the government. They more often than not benefit the government and empower the security services, empower surveillance and empower censorship. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen in China. So, if there is a big technological advance when it comes to communications or how we organize the internet, there’s no reason to expect that won’t just benefit the authorities as much as, or even more than, it benefits ordinary people.

Eli Binder is a New York-based staff writer for The Wire. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, in Hong Kong and Singapore, as an Overseas Press Club Foundation fellow. @ebinder21