Review | How China built Great Firewall, and how web users can build a transparent, democratic internet – new book
- James Griffiths has written an even-handed history of the internet in China that is as critical of censors there as it is of the profit-driven US tech industry
- Author hopes, perhaps optimistically, that a user-controlled internet built around the technology’s promise of freedom and education can develop instead
The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths, Zed Books
Many potential readers of James Griffiths’ book will have experienced the Great Firewall referenced in the title, but that doesn’t mean they won’t find the book useful. Griffiths stitches events and issues, most of which are reasonably well known, into a coherent narrative, providing a readable and informative history of the internet in China.
The book’s strength is in Griffiths’s measured tone and general even-handedness. He is as critical – more despairing than scathing – of the American tech industry as he is of Chinese government policy, and notes that much of the technical apparatus used to enforce China’s restrictive version of the internet was supplied, at least initially, by American firms.
When he quotes Chinese leaders and commentators on the need to control the internet, he reminds readers that “successive US presidents, from Clinton to Bush to Obama, hailed the internet as a tool for spreading economic and political liberalisation around the world”.
For readers interested in the larger issues, The Great Firewall of China’s recapitulation of the history of the internet in China, and discussion of how many of the best-laid plans went awry, is a good jumping-off point. Griffiths’s own framing is contained in his subtitle: “How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet” – an alternative, that is, to the freewheeling libertarian ethos of internet pioneers, an ideology that, even in the United States, now seems more breached than honoured.
The particular details of the Chinese internet aside, one of the consequences is the potential balkanisation of the global internet into national, government-controlled webs with only restricted and restrictive connections between them. This violates what some might consider the entire point of the internet, but in China and elsewhere, the internet is now primarily a lifestyle service, rather than a vehicle for the exercise of personal liberty. Official Chinese content probably suffices for almost everyone. The political and social curbs placed on foreign internet services have also delivered protectionist competitive advantages to Chinese tech firms.
