The Great Firewall of China : How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet

"China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Updated throughout and available in paperback for the first time, The Great Firewall of China draws on James Griffiths' unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. New chapters cover the suppression of information about the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns in response to the exposure of the persecution of Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and the crackdown against the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong."-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents Author’s note Acronyms and abbreviations Map Introduction: Early warnings Part 1: Wall 1. Protests: Solidarity from Hong Kong to Tiananmen 2. Over the wall: China’s first email and the rise of the online censor 3. Nailing the jello: Chinese democracy and the Great Firewall 4. Enemy at the gates: How fear of Falun Gong boosted the Firewall 5. Searching for an opening: Google, Yahoo and Silicon Valley’s moral failing in China Part 2: Shield 6. Along came a spider: Lu Wei reins in the Chinese internet 7. Peak traffic: Getting the Dalai Lama online 8. Filtered: The Firewall catches up with 9. Jumping the wall: FreeGate, UltraSurf, and Falun Gong’s fight against the censors 10. Called to account: Silicon Valley’s reckoning on Capitol Hill Part 3: Sword 11. Uyghurs online: Ilham Tohti and the birth of the Uyghur internet 12. Shutdown: How to take 20 million people offline 13. Ghosts in the machine: Chinese hackers expand the Firewall’s reach 14. NoGuGe: The ignominious end of Google China 15. The social network: Weibo and the last free-speech platform 16. Gorillas in the mist: Exposing China’s hackers to the world Part 4: War 17. Caught: The death of the Uyghur internet 18. Key opinion leader: How Chinese trolls go after dissidents overseas 19. Root and stem: The internet is more vulnerable than you think 20. The censor at the UN: China’s undermining of global internet freedoms 21. Sovereignty: When Xi Jinping came for the internet 22. Friends in Moscow: The Great Firewall goes west 23. Plane crash: China helps Russia bring Telegram to heel 24. One app to rule them all: How WeChat opened up new frontiers of surveillance and censorship 25. Buttocks: Uganda’s internet blackouts follow China’s lead 26. Swatting flies: Google’s failed attempt to get back into China 27. Propaganda war: Beijing’s attempts to control the narrative over Xinjiang 28. Fighting rumours: How the coronavirus pandemic exposed the danger of the Great Firewall Epilogue: The Great Firewall looms over Hong Kong Acknowledgements Notes Selected bibliography Index "Once little more than a glorified porn filter, China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. Through years of investigation James Griffiths gained unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. As distortion, post-truth and fake news become old news James Griffiths shows just how far the Great Firewall has spread. Now is the time for a radical new vision of online liberty"--Publisher's website