China is the country with the largest economy today, which has the ability to dictate terms in many markets due to its position. China is also the most populous country on earth, with almost 1.5 billion people. However, the whole society is isolated from the world by an invisible wall made of censorship, propaganda and disinformation. China’s communist leaders constantly maintain tight control over what the nation can see online. Additionally, the internet itself is different from that available to Europeans and is the largest internal network in the entire global web. Read the article and find out why the Chinese internet is different.
Restrictions on using global applications
Internet in China has many limitations. First of all, you can’t use many very popular global services such as Google (including Chrome browser, Gmail, Drive, GoogleMaps, etc.), Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instgram, Uber. Each of them has its Chinese counterpart, which is not very friendly to Western users (by lack of English version). For example, the most popular messenger and social network in China is WeChat. If you travel to China, you should be prepared that after landing at the airport all of the mentioned and familiar applications will be blocked. It will be impossible to use them even to write an e-mail or read a notification.
Why is the Chinese Internet different? – Content censorship
In addition to restrictions on access to western applications there is a special project – Great Firewall. Its task is to block content inside the Chinese Internet and prevent specific phrases from being searched. These include phrases that are incompatible with or critical of the ideology imposed by the authorities, or have an informative or awareness-raising function. Therefore, when we are in China, we will not find any results for such phrases as: democracy, human rights. You will also not find anything about freedom of speech, Marxist philosophy, Buddhism or student protests on Tian’anmen Square. In addition, you can forget about any access to the BBC website or Wikipedia.
