What Would China be Like if the Internet Wasn’t Censored?

Everyone knows that China’s internet is censored. There’s the government-run firewall that blocks and interferes with unwanted sites, and then there’s the extensive network of self-censors at all of China’s internet companies who delete content they fear might incur the wrath of the regime.

But what if that wasn’t true? What would happen if tomorrow, the “Great Firewall” was torn down and Chinese internet companies were told they no longer needed to censor their content?

It’s a fascinating question, and quite an important one. In a recent speech, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei said that China must open up or die, especially when it comes to technology:

Why must we be xenophobic? Do we Chinese do everything better than foreigners? Why must there be total independence; independence just means closing the country off from foreign things like in feudal times, and we [Huawei] oppose this […] we must avoid establishing closed systems. We must create open systems, especially when it comes to hardware. If we don’t open up, we will die off. If we don’t learn from [the openness] of the Americans, we will never be able to beat them.

But what would an open internet look like? And what would have to change to make China’s internet open? I put the question to a number of experts — people who have been watching China’s internet and technology spheres for years — to see what they think might happen.

Where we are now

What, exactly, would it mean for the internet to be uncensored? The first step would be the dismantling of the Great Firewall, the software that blocks the IP addresses of “sensitive” sites like Facebook and Twitter. I spoke to the folks behind Greatfire.org, an organization that collects data about the Great Firewall (often abbreviated as GFW), about what the system does and what would be changing if it were to be dismantled. The representative that I spoke with asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the Chinese government.

He told me there is no way of fully knowing how many websites the Great Firewall blocks. GreatFire has tracked more than 8,000 blocked URLs, but that number cannot be interpreted as a fair representation of the total number of sites blocked. In fact, it sounds like literally no one knows how many sites are blocked:

Not even the authorities responsible for the blocking can know. This is because what they block technically isn’t one specific website, but an IP address, a keyword or a domain name. One single IP address used for shared hosting can block access to thousands of websites.

But the Great Firewall doesn’t just block sites, it also sometimes throttles them. The GreatFire representative told me:

The GFW definitely affects the speed of foreign websites. We measure download speed of foreign websites from China and publish the data frequently (here’s an example). The average download speed of top 500 foreign websites, though it’s slowly getting faster, is less than 20 kilobytes per second. This can be compared to what you got on a 90’s-style dialup modem (~8 kilobytes per second) and our own data for the average download speed of domestic websites (~110 kilobytes per second).