Golden Shield Project - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Golden Shield Project , colloquially referred to as the Great Firewall of China is a censorship

Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China

Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. There are no specific laws or regulations which the censorship follows...

and surveillance

Surveillance

Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people. It is sometimes done in a surreptitious manner...

project operated by the Ministry of Public Security

Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China

The Ministry of Public Security , is the principal police and security authority of the mainland of the People's Republic of China and the government agency that exercises oversight over and is ultimately responsible for day-to-day law enforcement...

(MPS) division (or branch) of the government of the People's Republic of China

Government of the People's Republic of China

All power within the government of the People's Republic of China is divided among three bodies: the People's Republic of China, State Council, and the People's Liberation Army . This article is concerned with the formal structure of the state, its departments and their responsibilities...

. The project was initiated in 1998 and began operations in November 2003.

History

The political and ideological background of the Golden Shield Project is considered to be one of Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...

's favorite sayings in the early 1980s: "If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in." The saying is related to a period of the economic reform of China that became known as the "socialist market economy". Superseding the political ideologies of the Cultural Revolution, the reform led China towards a market economy and opened up the market for foreign investors. Nonetheless the economic freedom, values, and political ideas of the Communist Party of China have had to be protected from "swatting flies" of other unwanted ideologies.

The Internet arrived in China in the year 1994 as an inevitable consequence of, and supporting tool for the "socialist market economy." Since then, and with gradual increasing penetration, the Internet has become a common communication platform and an important tool for sharing information.

The Ministry of Public Security took initial steps to control Internet use in 1997 when it issued comprehensive regulations governing its use. The key sections, Articles 4-6, are: "Individuals are prohibited from using the Internet to: harm national security; disclose state secrets; or injure the interests of the state or society. Users are prohibited from using the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit information that incites resistance to the PRC Constitution, laws, or administrative regulations; promotes the overthrow of the government or socialist system; undermines national unification; distorts the truth, spreads rumors, or destroys social order; or provides sexually suggestive material or encourages gambling, violence, or murder. Users are prohibited from engaging in activities that harm the security of computer information networks and from using networks or changing network resources without prior approval."

In 1998 the Communist Party of China

Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...

feared the China Democracy Party

China Democracy Party

Democracy Party of China is a political party that started in the People's Republic of China, and was banned by the Communist Party of China . The history of the DPC and its foundation date is unclear because it has many historical paths under different groups of founders...

(CDP) would breed a powerful new network that the party elites might not be able to control. The CDP was immediately banned followed by arrests and imprisonment. That same year the Golden Shield project was started. The first part of the project lasted eight years and was completed in 2006. The second part began in 2006 and ended in 2008.
On 6 December 2002, 300 people in charge of the Golden Shield project from 31 provinces

Province (China)

A province, in the context of Chinese government, is a translation of sheng formally provincial level divisions, which is an administrative division. Provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions, and the special administrative regions, make up the four types of province of administrative division...

and cities throughout China participated in a four-day inaugural “Comprehensive Exhibition on Chinese Information System”. At the exhibition, many western high-tech products including Internet security

Internet security

Internet security is a branch of computer security specifically related to the Internet. Its objective is to establish rules and measures to use against attacks over the Internet. The Internet represents an insecure channel for exchanging information leading to a high risk of intrusion or fraud,...

, video monitoring and human face recognition

Facial recognition system

A facial recognition system is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source...

were purchased. It is estimated that around 30-50,000 police are employed in this gigantic project.

It has been nicknamed the Great Firewall of China (防火长城) in reference to its role as a network firewall

Firewall (computing)

A firewall is a device or set of devices designed to permit or deny network transmissions based upon a set of rules and is frequently used to protect networks from unauthorized access while permitting legitimate communications to pass....

and to the ancient Great Wall of China

Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is a series of stone and earthen fortifications in northern China, built originally to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire against intrusions by various nomadic groups...

. A major part of the project includes the ability to block content by preventing IP address

IP address

An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...

es from being routed through and consists of standard firewalls and proxy server

Proxy server

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

s at the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

gateways

Gateway (telecommunications)

In telecommunications, the term gateway has the following meaning:*In a communications network, a network node equipped for interfacing with another network that uses different protocols....

. The system also selectively engages in DNS cache poisoning

DNS cache poisoning

DNS cache poisoning is a security or data integrity compromise in the Domain Name System . The compromise occurs when data is introduced into a DNS name server's cache database that did not originate from authoritative DNS sources. It may be a deliberate attempt of a maliciously crafted attack on a...

when particular sites are requested. The government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical. Because of its disconnection from the larger world of IP routing protocols, the network contained within the Great Firewall has been described as "the Chinese autonomous routing domain

Routing domain

In computer networking, a routing domain is a collection of networked systems that operate common routing protocols and are under the control of a single administration...

".

During the 2008 Olympic Games

2008 Summer Olympics

The 2008 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, was a major international multi-sport event that took place in Beijing, China, from August 8 to August 24, 2008. A total of 11,028 athletes from 204 National Olympic Committees competed in 28 sports and 302 events...

, Chinese officials told Internet providers to prepare to unblock access from certain Internet café

Internet cafe

An Internet café or cybercafé is a place which provides internet access to the public, usually for a fee. These businesses usually provide snacks and drinks, hence the café in the name...

s, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners were expected to work or stay.

Purpose

In September 2002, Li Runsen, the technology director at Ministry of Public Security

Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China

and member of the Golden Shield leadership, further explained this broad definition to thousands of police nationwide at a meeting in Beijing called "Information Technology for China’s Public Security".

In October 2001, Greg Walton of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development

International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development

The International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development , is a non-partisan, independent Canadian institution that was established by an act of the Canadian parliament in 1988 to "encourage and support the universal values of human rights and the promotion of democratic institutions...

published a report; he wrote:
The empirical study by the OpenNet Initiative

OpenNet Initiative

The OpenNet Initiative is a joint project whose goal is to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employs a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run...

(collaboration between Harvard Law School, University of Toronto Citizen Lab, and Cambridge Security Program) found out that China has the most sophisticated content-filtering Internet regime in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other countries, Chinese Government effectively filters content by employing multiple methods of regulation and technical controls. In contrary, the PRC-sponsored news agency, Xinhua, stated that censorship targets only "superstitious, pornographic, violence-related, gambling and other harmful information."

In July 2007, authorities intensified the "monitoring and control" of The Great Firewall, causing email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

disruption, in anticipation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting scheduled for August 2007.

Some commonly-used technical methods for censoring are:

Method	Description
IP blocking IP blocking IP blocking prevents the connection between a server/website and certain IP addresses or ranges of addresses. IP blocking effectively bans undesired connections from those computers to a website, mail server, or other Internet server....	The access to a certain IP address IP address An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing... is denied. If the target Web site is hosted in a shared hosting server Shared web hosting service A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service or derive host refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site "sits" on its own partition, or section/place on the server, to keep it separate from other sites... , all Web sites on the same server will be blocked. This affects all IP protocols (mostly TCP Transmission Control Protocol The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP... ) such as HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.... , FTP File Transfer Protocol File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server... or POP Post Office Protocol In computing, the Post Office Protocol is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern... . A typical circumvention method is to find proxies Proxy server In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server... that have access to the target Web sites, but proxies may be jammed or blocked. Some large Web sites allocated additional IP addresses to circumvent the block, but later the block was extended to cover the new addresses.
DNS Domain name system The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities... filtering and redirection	Doesn't resolve domain name Domain name A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System .... s, or returns incorrect IP addresses. This affects all IP protocols such as HTTP, FTP or POP. A typical circumvention method is to find a domain name server that resolves domain names correctly, but domain name servers are subject to blockage as well, especially IP blocking. Another workaround is to bypass DNS if the IP address is obtainable from other sources and is not blocked. Examples are modifying the Hosts file Hosts file The hosts file is a computer file used in an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses. The hosts file is a plain-text file and is conventionally named hosts.-Purpose:... or typing the IP address instead of the domain name in a Web browser Web browser A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content... .
URL Uniform Resource Locator In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource.... filtering	Scan the requested Uniform Resource Locator Uniform Resource Locator In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource.... (URL) string for target keywords regardless of the domain name specified in the URL. This affects the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Hypertext Transfer Protocol The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.... . Typical circumvention methods are to use escaped characters Percent-encoding Percent-encoding, also known as URL encoding, is a mechanism for encoding information in a Uniform Resource Identifier under certain circumstances. Although it is known as URL encoding it is, in fact, used more generally within the main Uniform Resource Identifier set, which includes both Uniform... in the URL, or to use encrypted protocols such as VPN Virtual private network A virtual private network is a network that uses primarily public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or traveling users access to a central organizational network.... and SSL Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer , are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet... .
Packet filtering	Terminate TCP packet transmissions when a certain number of controversial keywords are detected. This affects all TCP protocols such as HTTP, FTP or POP, but Search engine Search engine A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information... pages are more likely to be censored. Typical circumvention methods are to use encrypted protocols such as VPN and SSL, to escape the HTML content, or reducing the TCP/IP Internet protocol suite The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this... stack Protocol stack The protocol stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite. The terms are often used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, the suite is the definition of the protocols, and the stack is the software implementation of them.... 's MTU Maximum transmission unit In computer networking, the maximum transmission unit of a communications protocol of a layer is the size of the largest protocol data unit that the layer can pass onwards. MTU parameters usually appear in association with a communications interface... , thus reducing the amount of text contained in a given packet.
Connection reset	If a previous TCP connection is blocked by the filter, future connection attempts from both sides will also be blocked for up to 30 minutes. Depending on the location of the block, other users or Web sites may be also blocked if the communications are routed Routing Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network , electronic data networks , and transportation networks... to the location of the block. A circumvention method is to ignore the reset packet sent by the firewall.

Censored content

Mainland Chinese Internet censorship

Internet censorship

Internet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative...

programs have censored Web sites that include (among other things):

Web sites belonging to outlawed or suppressed groups, such as pro-democracy activists and Falun Gong
Falun Gong
Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline first introduced in China in 1992 by its founder, Li Hongzhi, through public lectures. It combines the practice of meditation and slow-moving qigong exercises with the moral philosophy...
News sources that often cover topics such as police brutality
Police brutality
Police brutality is the intentional use of excessive force, usually physical, but potentially also in the form of verbal attacks and psychological intimidation, by a police officer....

, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...

, freedom of speech
Freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...

, democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...

, and Marxist sites. These sites include Voice of America
Voice of America
Voice of America is the official external broadcast institution of the United States federal government. It is one of five civilian U.S. international broadcasters working under the umbrella of the Broadcasting Board of Governors . VOA provides a wide range of programming for broadcast on radio...

and the Chinese edition of BBC News
BBC News
BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...

.
Sites related to the Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

ese government, media, or other organizations, including sites dedicated to religious content, and most large Taiwanese community websites or blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s.
Web sites that contain anything the Chinese authorities regard as obscenity
Obscenity
An obscenity is any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time, is a profanity, or is otherwise taboo, indecent, abhorrent, or disgusting, or is especially inauspicious...

or pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
Web sites relating to criminal activity
Sites linked with the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...

, his teachings or the International Tibet Independence Movement
International Tibet Independence Movement
The Tibetan independence movement is a movement for the independence of the lands where Tibetan people live and the political separation of those lands from the People's Republic of China. It is principally led by the Tibetan diaspora in countries like India and the United States, and by...
Most blogging sites experience frequent or permanent outages
Web sites deemed as subversive

Blocked Web sites are indexed to a lesser degree, if at all, by some Chinese search engines. This sometimes has considerable impact on search results.

According to The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

has set up computer systems inside China that try to access Web sites outside the country. If a site is inaccessible, then it is added to Google China

Google China

Google China is a subsidiary of Google, Inc., the world's largest Internet search engine company. Google China ranks as the number 2 search engine in the People's Republic of China, after Baidu...

's blacklist. However, once unblocked, the Web sites will be reindexed.
Referring to Google's first-hand experience of the great firewall, there is some hope in the international community that it will reveal some of its secrets. Simon Davies, founder of London-based pressure group Privacy International, is now challenging Google to reveal the technology it once used at China's behest. "That way, we can understand the nature of the beast and, perhaps, develop circumvention measures so there can be an opening up of communications." "That would be a dossier of extraordinary importance to human rights," Davies says. Google has yet to respond to his call.

Bypassing

A number of methods are available to bypass Internet censorship in China, including:

Using a proxy server
Proxy server
In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

located outside of China.
Using Onion routing
Onion routing
Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. Messages are repeatedly encrypted and then sent through several network nodes called onion routers. Like someone unpeeling an onion, each onion router removes a layer of encryption to uncover routing instructions, and...

, as is done by the I2P
I2P
I2P is a mixed-license, free and open source project building an anonymous network .The network is a simple layer that applications can use to anonymously and securely send...

and Tor
Tor (anonymity network)
Tor is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software routes Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers in order to conceal a user's location or usage from someone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis...

systems.
Using Freegate
Freegate
Freegate is software that enables internet users from mainland China, Syria, Iran, Vietnam and United Arab Emirates, among others, to view websites blocked by their governments. The program takes advantage of a range of open proxies, which allow users to penetrate firewalls used to block web sites....

, Freenet
Freenet
Freenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store originally designed by Ian Clarke. According to Clarke, Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity; as part of supporting its users' freedom, Freenet is free and...

, Psiphon
Psiphon
Psiphon is a web proxy designed to help Internet users securely bypass the content-filtering systems used to censor the internet by governments in places like China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Pakistan, Belarus' and others...

, Ultrasurf
Ultrasurf
Ultrasurf is a free Internet censorship circumvention product of Ultrareach Internet Corporation.-Operation:The software works by creating an encrypted HTTP tunnel between the user’s computer and a central pool of proxy servers, enabling users to bypass firewalls and censorship...

, and other free programs that can circumvent Internet censorship and/or provide anonymous communication. Ultrasurf also scans for various government and commercial websites from the user's computer and may be used to monitor dissidents.
Using the open application programming interface (API) which is used by Twitter and which enables posting and retrieving tweets on sites other than Twitter. "The idea is that coders elsewhere get to Twitter, and offer up feeds at their own URLs—which the government has to chase down one by one." says Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Obtaining professional advice from any one of the many companies offering bypass services from outside of China.
Establishing regional Web sites within China. This avoids having traffic go through the Great Firewall; however, it requires companies to apply for a local ICP license
ICP license
ICP license is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to permit China-based websites to operate in China...

.
Reconfiguring the end points of communication to discard reset packets generated by the Great Firewall by using the TTL value (time to live) to distinguish resets generated by the Firewall from more legitimate resets.

Unblocking

Certain sites have begun to be partially unblocked, including:

The English-language BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

website (but not the Chinese language
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

website).
YouTube, although it has been subsequently re-blocked.
Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), including the Chinese-language edition, although photographs and certain pages remain inaccessible.
Social web
Social Web
The social Web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The Social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social interactions form the basis of much online activity...

sites and free web hosting websites. However, these have also been re-blocked.
Some foreign news websites.

Exporting technology

Reporters Without Borders

Reporters Without Borders is a France-based international non-governmental organization that advocates freedom of the press. It was founded in 1985, by Robert Ménard, Rony Brauman and the journalist Jean-Claude Guillebaud. Jean-François Julliard has served as Secretary General since 2008...

suspects that regimes such as Cuba

Censorship in Cuba

Censorship in Cuba has been reported on extensively, and resulted in European Union sanctions as well as statements of protest from groups, governments, and noted individuals....

, Zimbabwe and Belarus

Censorship in Belarus

Censorship in Belarus, although prohibited by the country's constitution, is enforced by a number of laws. These include a law that makes insulting the president punishable by up to five years in prison, and another that makes criticizing Belarus abroad punishable by up to two years in prison.-...

have obtained surveillance technology from the People's Republic of China.

Protest in China

Despite strict government regulations, the Chinese people are continuing to protest against their government’s attempt to censor the Internet. The more covert protesters will set up secure SSH and VPN connections using tools such as UltraSurf. They can also utilize the widely available proxies and virtual private networks to fanqiang, or "climb the wall." Active protest is not absent. Chinese people will post their grievances online, and on some occasions, have been successful. In 2003, the death of Sun Zhigang, a young migrant worker sparked an intense, widespread online response from the Chinese public, despite the risk of the government’s punishment. A few months later, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao abolished the Chinese law which led to the death of Sun. Ever since, dissent has regularly created turmoil on the Internet in China. Also in January 2010, when Google announced that it will no longer censor its Web search results in China, even if this means it might have to shut down its Chinese operations altogether, many Chinese people went to the company’s Chinese offices to display their grievances and offer gifts

Illegal flower tribute

"Illegal flower tribute" is an Internet meme that emerged after Google's announcement of a possible exit from Mainland China in January 2010. On , Google posted an article on its official Blogspot blog, entitled "A New Approach to China", in which it disclosed its decision to end compliance with...

, such as flowers, fruits and cigarettes.

External links

Tool for keeping track of websites and searches that are blocked in mainland China
China Digital Times: Internet Control
Breaking Through the “Golden Shield”
ViewDNS.info - Chinese Firewall Test - Tests if Golden Shield is performing DNS filtering/redirection on your domain within mainland China.
Vpnsurfing.com - Psiphon3 - Psiphon3: A Free VPN and Free SSH Connection Tool

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.