It’s tremendously easy to circumvent internet censorship in China. If anybody wants to access a blocked website, it can be done. One method I use is a proxy server, which is free. The other is a virtual private network (VPN), which costs a little money (maybe $1 a week to subscribe to.) Both essentially give me an American IP address, and encode my internet, so the firewall can’t pick out any information that it should block. I’m actually using a free VPN as I write this, called Hotspot Shield, however it is constantly popping up ads, for everything from toothpaste to porn, and I would not recommend it to anybody.
What the Golden Shield Project, or “Great Firewall,” does, however, is create a huge inconvenience, and the average internet user in China can generally find what they’re looking for on Chinese websites much more easily than foreign ones. For example, there is a Chinese equivalent to Facebook (http://www.renren.com) and numerous blog-hosting websites (http://www.sina.com.cn, for one), which follow Chinese law and censor themselves. An internet user here has no reason to go through the inconvenience of reading or setting up a Blogger or WordPress blog, unless they have something sensitive to say.
The genius of the system is not that its bullet-proof – far from it. It’s effective because it sets up enough roadblocks that if somebody wishes to access censored material, they must go through one of the above methods to do so. Most internet users simply aren’t bothered to jump through a few hoops to do that.
Of course, its effectiveness also goes hand-in-hand with a few other things, such as the government’s control of the education system and media. For instance, few people born after 1980 have heard about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, as it isn’t a part of any Chinese history class and never mentioned in the media. Why would they search for something they’ve never heard of? Similarly, a certain view of Tibetan history is taught that is almost uniformly believed in China (China as liberators of the Tibetan serfs), and the Dalai Lama’s portrayal in the Chinese media is essentially the opposite to that found in the western media.
This kind of brings us back to Google. If it leaves, it’s leaving essentially the entire Chinese market behind. Few Chinese users will take the time and effort to continue to use Google if search results are constantly blocked for not abiding by Chinese law. Users will turn to the Chinese Baidu, or maybe Microsoft’s Bing will step in and fill the void. On the other hand, if Google backtracks now, and agrees to re-censor its search results, it would be a huge embarrassment for the company. From a business perspective, Google will probably be the loser.
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