The Net as Seen in China

by Nino Ivanov

On the evening of July 5, 2020, curiosity got the better part of me and I decided to fulfill a dream of mine: to see the Internet the way the Chinese see it.

Before you, dear reader, do anything unwise, let me urge you: if you reproduce this experiment, then do it from a virtual machine or a live CD.  Yes, there were "countermeasures," though I cannot exactly say of what kind.

I was considering doing this time and again, but what I usually saw was advice like this: Get a VPN and exit in China; turn off Google, BBC, Wikipedia, and Facebook in your /etc/hosts; and the like, most of which has been more jocose than seriously considered.

Essentially, everybody thought, including myself, "I will go there and play a happy game of cat and mouse where I will seek things, and Baidu (their most popular search engine) will give me no results.  When I type 'Tiananmen Square massacre,' I shall find nothing."  The truth proved more interesting.

My first attempts had been with a VPN.  I chose an exit in Beijing and... after two minutes, I had seen they changed it to Hong Kong.  And from then on, it was practically impossible for me to get to Beijing.  I understand why - because they likely would have to justify before authorities what, exactly, their exit node there was up to.  So if I was the "curious" type, they would simply "eject" me.

My other attempt was a proxy configuration in Firefox.  You will find many "fake" proxies: either ones which show you nothing, which is unrealistic (they do have a net, of course), or ones which show you everything, and which seemed to me either entirely fake, or perhaps they were local "escape routes."  But I wanted one which would show me gov.cn and would not show me google.com.

At last, on premproxy.com/socks-by-country/China-01.htm, I found a SOCKS5 proxy, 202.107.233.123:3010, which worked.

First, I tried Google, just for the fun of it.  Nothing.  And when I mean nothing, it is not a "blocked" sign, as Germany, Austria, or the U.K. give you when they block a torrent site, but rather it is as if the site does not even exist.

Then I tried Yandex.  That was interesting: yandex.ru should normally show you a search field, but instead it showed a login mask with no search opportunity.  Yet, it also showed in the URL, /auth/?origin=china - so I knew "I had properly arrived."

At last, I resorted to Baidu and, of course, searched for "Tiananmen Square massacre" (I did this all in English, knowing no Chinese), even insisting at some point with "massacre" in quotes.  Indeed, that was properly "cleansed."  You get a lot of historic information, including about events of 80 years ago, but you do not see a word of "that which everybody knows."

One article, however, stood out: "What's wrong with our liberal studies courses?" under www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/166/123/116/1562602958531.html.

What was interesting about it was that it mentioned a few things - according to hardcore party line, of course, but still.  It told you not to mess with the "black police" - which obviously means such exists.  And it told that "Students were evacuated from the Tiananmen Square peacefully" which is perfectly ludicrous, because, you know, why would you "evacuate" someone from somewhere if... "nothing ever happened?"

What this article taught me was that if you are Chinese, you actually see some information, but if you want to actually understand things, you will have to "see through the propaganda."  This article namely said that there was a disturbance on the Tiananmen Square and that there is special attention of the authorities to that issue.

The results were still interesting: the Chinese by far do not get "no result at all," as I naively assumed.  They get results, but results which, if anything, are apt to distract the reader and, lest the reader be careless, advance official positions.

I proceeded to try various sites, imagining myself as an avid Chinese youngster curious for information.  I was about to learn an interesting lesson.

I tried Wikipedia - nothing, no site.

I tried "Black Lives Matter" - now, it was full of BLM links, and I actually can easily understand why: "Look at the American unruly society, they have racism and they lack discipline" was the immediate thought I had at the sea of links that stretched before me, imagining to be a censor.  From a propaganda point of view, the clashes in the U.S. - no matter the cause or the arguments - are surely nothing to keep from the Chinese public.

Will they keep major historical events secret?  I Googled whether the Americans landed on the moon, and it is full of links, including the Indian confirmation with photographs of the landing site.  So China does willingly allow its citizens to inform themselves of major events that are hard to keep secret.

Could I get "simple, but important" information? Like the European Union's main page?  Oh, I could.  And that is not unrisky, because the E.U. does have some China-critical legislation in its legal archives.  I admit, I did not check these, though.

At that point, I harbored a funny belief that when you reached a site, you could navigate the entire site.  That later turned out not to be true.  I had no Google Translate, obviously, so I turned to Babelfish.  It worked!  I wanted to translate from English-to-Chinese "Corruption in China" - and, promptly, Babelfish disappeared.  As if the site had not existed.

Then I "accepted the challenge" and went looking for a VPN.

I knew these were forbidden - but were they attainable?  And this is where I got an important lesson: you can actually seek "VPN" in Baidu, and it will return a lot, a lot of results.  (This was not like in the Tiananmen Square massacre case, where there were no links or just irrelevant links!)  But when you tried to open the VPN links in new tabs, nearly all of them failed to actually open.  Only some iVPN, StrongVPN, VPN.ie, and VPN Pioneer sites got through.  I do believe they do their very best to block them all, but some are likely too unusual and some are too new.  What was funny is that some "list of VPN providers" actually got through, and there I got a lot of links that Baidu itself would not indicate.  So finding a list of links might be your first step in breaking out of the "search cage."

Regarding news, I immediately supposed that English news would be harder, so I first tried news in Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria.  A lot of the main newspapers were blocked.  But particularly the "yellow press" got a chance (like trud.bg), and in Austria, it was funny that the more "right-wing" newspaper - Die Presse - was accessible, whereas the more "left-wing" - Der Standard - was not.  Interestingly, the official site of the state television (ORF.at) was accessible.  And because Die Presse had their own search function, I could actually find critical reports about the mistreatment of the Uyghurs.  Sites like focus.de, which rely on Google Custom Search for their results, could not show results.

Very interesting was spiegel.de: for the first time, I saw a sort of "skeletal" site, garbled and text-only.  Apparently, the site had been somehow "processed" - you get a sight as the browser's links and lynx would offer you, but still, it is there.  This clearly looked to me more like a "recreation" of the site, reconstructed after deconstruction and analysis, rather than a version of the original site.  What initially surprised me was the "trust": that a site was not, in case of doubt, censored, but rather "carefully scrubbed."

Then I turned to the English-speaking world.

American sites you can practically all forget, and the same went for the English sites.  I saw two sorts of censorship: the "this site does not even exist" type, which was true for anything with the BBC, and the "Baidu shows you the links, but you cannot click them" type, which was true for The Sun or CNN.

Some headline aggregators (like www.newsdump.co.uk) did get through, though, and you could see in these bits and pieces of "what the West was talking about" and "that you shall never see."

I assumed, if U.S. and U.K. failed, then so would Canada, and, as Australia (and by extension New Zealand) have disputes with China, I assumed them to be excluded a priori, too.  So I went for... South Africa... and I saw that most media was inaccessible there, too, and way worse than the German-speaking world!  That was enlightening.  So if you were to search in English, you would have the most restrictions (apart from Chinese, which I cannot judge), not matter the country.

Some sites worked, however, but here, the selective search function was interesting:

Seeking for China here: southafricatribune.com/?s=china actually works; but looking for Uyghurs is totally blocked: southafricatribune.com/?s=uighurs

Here, "something happened."

Suddenly, Firefox went to 100 percent CPU activity, including when I closed all new Chinese tabs.  I had to pkill it and restart.  I am not sure if this was a premeditated countermeasure or some general mess-up, but yes, "That guy who cared that much about the Uyghurs and the Tiananmen Square massacre better reconsider his activities."  Maybe I'm paranoid, but that was my thought.  On with the show...

The English press, particularly including the yellow press, was censored, but I was still determined to get my "British News" - and there they were indeed: british-news.com, with a laaaarge Union Jack on top, because you know, a Union Jack makes the whole thing super trustworthy.

This was all getting ridiculous.  I decided I should try site:co.uk in Baidu, and boom, it worked!  Baidu actually uses Google search mnemonics!  This level of copying was ridiculous!  I actually got www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uk/.  Uyghur time, right?  Like it worked in Austria's Die Presse?

Wrong.  There is no such website with search function.

"Alright, Baidu" I thought, and tried: china site:telegraph.co.uk (yeah, Baidu, that is what you get for plagiarizing Google search mnemonics).  This worked.  I don't need to repeat my mistake of the South Africa Tribune - I do not need to search for Uyghurs.  China is sensitive enough!

And then the real fun ensued: www.telegraph.co.uk/china was, indeed, accessible - but as a skeletal site, the same scrubbed, unpleasant-to-use-and-motivating-you-to-navigate-away style as I had seen in spiegel.de.  Haaa, there was the juicy stuff!

I click: "Letters: China has gradually become the greatest threat now facing the world", www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/07/02/letters-china-has-gradually-become-greatest-threat-now-facing

Poof!  "Such a site has never been heard of, my friend."

O.K., how about:

"Hong Kong's security law is a global problem", www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/07/03/hong-kongs-security-law-global-problem

Poof!  Nothing.

I returned to www.telegraph.co.uk/china.  Poof!  Nothing!  Now not even the scrubbed site was visible anymore!

O.K., I tried again just www.telegraph.co.uk.  Worked.  I tried some irrelevant story about some British athlete.  Poof, nothing again!  I returned to the main page aaaaand... www.telegraph.co.uk itself was gone.  "No such site."

That was an excellent demonstration of how their "progressive blocking" apparently works.

What conclusions can we draw from this?

1.)  The basis of the censorship is apparently "ideological" and not "technical."  Information is by no means "completely inaccessible," but the progressive blocking and the "showing of links in Baidu which do not open" sort of "let you feel observed and controlled," that someone might hold you accountable and ask questions on what and why you were searching.  That some sites are "skeletal," but conditionally accessible, yet if you strain their patience, these sites will vanish in front of your eyes, like The Telegraph.  At first, I was thinking that Baidu was just being extremely sloppy in showing me what links there were that I would never access.  After all, that was proof that I was being censored, was it not?  But the Chinese authorities are not stupid at all.  You could argue, they actually want it that way: you shall know about the censorship - yes, you indeed are being censored, and you yourself should decide.  Should you click on a link or not, should a responsible citizen do this or not?  This is the main difference from the naive "cat and mouse game."  Baidu does not indicate to you which links actually work and which do not, and how often do you think you can click before "having a little chat about your hobbies?"  So the real censorship, in my eyes, is not of "technical nature," as I assumed naively at the onset.  Instead, it is a promotion of self-censorship, which is a lot more interesting and effective and, with enough material available to get you into trouble if you seek trouble: are you, in your own eyes, a properly trustworthy and compliant individual or will you attempt to subvert the state laws?

2.)  Technically, there seem to be three categories of ex-ante censorship:

• Absolute censorship, like for the BBC or the Tiananmen Square massacre - no links, no nothing
• Relative censorship - you see the links, but when you click them, the site does not load (but you expose yourself, because you did click)
• "Skeletal" sites, scrubbed reconstructions of what they deem dangerous.

Apart from these, there seems to be ex post censorship, where previously granted access may be later revoked for a site in general.  There is no "deep analysis" of the site you visit, the analysis is apparently rather ongoing - which links you click.

3.)  You can use Baidu's Google-like mnemonics to search within a newspaper for "China" - this seems typically allowed.

4.)  The system has issues with morphologically variant-rich languages like German (like English transforms "go" to "went" - German does it all the time) and "unusual" languages, like my native Bulgarian.

5.)  You will need to learn to "read between the lines" a lot better than in the West - and they will serve you many facts "right there."

Needless to say, in the end I was all too happy to turn this proxy off.