The BBC have reported that China are making further moves to curb their internet use after calls for more regulation of the internet.
The president, Xi Jinping, has said that he wants a global system to help fight online crime and terrorism, but campaigners for free speech complain it would end in more censorship and surveillance.
But why does China already have so much censorship over internet and the media in the country?
The media censorship that is in place in China is seen as a way of the Communist Party of China keeping their reign in the county. One way of doing this has been to censor all media and internet usage so that they can prevent any unapproved reformist ideas or ideologies that could potentially make people want to change the way the country is run.
The censorship also prevents Chinese citizens from discovering or learning more about the past and/or current failures of the Communist Party that could potentially create or inflame any anti-government sentiment.
China has also blocked any access to foreign governments’ websites. It is though that this has been done in order to prevent citizens from discovering and learning about other systems of governance that are in place around the world, which they may demand for themselves.
There are two ways in which China have implemented media censorship. The first way is known as ‘The Great FireWall’ which is the government simply blocking citizen’s access to foreign websites. The second way is known as the ‘Golden Shield’ and is a system for domestic surveillance which was set up in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security
Because the Chinese government are so keen to keep out Western media and have banned popular social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. and have replaced them with their own sites YouKu and WeChat.
However, in recent years the Chinese government have introduced technology that doesn’t block a whole website, but instead restricts access to specific pages in addition to certain searches on sites such as Google.
According to The Economist, The “Freedom on the Net 2012” report, issued by Freedom House, an American organisation that tracks global trends in political freedom, ranked China as the third most restrictive country in the world when it comes to internet access and that overall, there are thought to be around 100,000 people, employed both by the state and by private companies, policing China’s internet around the clock.
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