Fallows on the Great Firewall

February 20, 2008 | Category: California, Internet censorship, Journalism School

For those who’ve always wondered about how China “harmonizes” the Internet, but haven’t wondered deeply enough to go wading into the techno-jungle to find out, The Atlantic Monthly has a new piece from James Fallows to service your curiosity. Nothing ground-breaking—he quotes the usual named suspects, most notably Andrew Lih and Xiao Qiang (the later a mentor of mine in navigating the Chinese Internet), and sticks to what most of us already know—but he does a fine job explaining it all in layman’s terms, and in relatively short-order as well.

Can’t remember off the top of my head if Atlantic hides its content behind a pay-wall. Go read the piece quickly just in case. In the meantime, here’s a taste:

Next is the perilous “connect” phase. If the DNS has looked up and provided the right IP address, your computer sends a signal requesting a connection with that remote site. While your signal is going out, and as the other system is sending a reply, the surveillance computers within China are looking over your request, which has been mirrored to them. They quickly check a list of forbidden IP sites. If you’re trying to reach one on that blacklist, the Chinese international-gateway servers will interrupt the transmission by sending an Internet “Reset” command both to your computer and to the one you’re trying to reach. Reset is a perfectly routine Internet function, which is used to repair connections that have become unsynchronized. But in this case it’s equivalent to forcing the phones on each end of a conversation to hang up. Instead of the site you want, you usually see an onscreen message beginning “The connection has been reset”; sometimes instead you get “Site not found.” Annoyingly, blogs hosted by the popular system Blogspot are on this IP blacklist. For a typical Google-type search, many of the links shown on the results page are from Wikipedia or one of these main blog sites. You will see these links when you search from inside China, but if you click on them, you won’t get what you want.

The full article is available, for the time being, here.

The Atlantic website also has an interview with Fallows on how he did the reporting for the article that illustrates nicely how sensitive-topic reporting is done over here. The interview was conducted by Abby Cutler, with whom, incidentally, I am scheduled to meet for drinks tonight. I’ll let you know if that encounter produces any additional insights.

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