Great Firewall

This whole great firewall of Chinese, this whole massive effort to control the internet, this effort to use modern information technology not to disseminate information, empowering individuals, but to make people think what you want them to think and to monitor their behavior so that you can isolate and suppress them. ~ Stephen Rosen

Great Firewall of China is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the Chinese government to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in the Internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic.

Quotes

• If you want to know what people are worried about look at what they spend their money on. If you’re afraid of burglars you buy a burglar alarm. What are the Chinese spending their money on? We’re told from Chinese figures they’re spending on the People's Armed Police, the internal security force is about as big as they’re spending on the regular military. This whole great firewall of Chinese, this whole massive effort to control the internet, this effort to use modern information technology not to disseminate information, empowering individuals, but to make people think what you want them to think and to monitor their behavior so that you can isolate and suppress them. That’s because this is a regime which is fundamentally afraid of its own people. And it’s fundamentally hostile to them.
  • Stephen Rosen, interview with Bill Kristol (30 November 2018), Conversations with Bill Kristol (transcript)

See also

• Censorship in China

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Great Firewall on Wikipedia