I recently finished The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version the Internet, written by CNN journalist James Griffiths in March of 2019, while I was sequestered in a cabin in a remote area of Washington State. I had read half of the book over the prior month, but this vacation provided a welcome opportunity to complete it.

Before I began The Great Firewall, I knew that China boasts a robust technological ecosystem, as is demonstrated by the multitude of global technological entities that originated in China. TikTok is among the most recent and prominent examples. Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, has inked contracts with governments across the world to develop their 5G networks. Alibaba appears to be Amazon’s sole rival in the global e-commerce arena. Almost undeniably, the only competitor to the American technological ecosystem is that of China. This I already knew. I was also vaguely aware of how China has banned some American technologies and companies from the Chinese market, through its “great firewall.” Similarly, the U.S. government has forced Chinese products and corporations from the American marketplace. These areas of knowledge were sufficiently interesting to compel me to learn more. So I purchased Griffiths’ book.

Though the title suggests a technical manuscript, The Great Firewall is far from it. In my view, the firewall itself is actually the secondary topic of the book; the first is China’s philosophy of censorship and how that philosophy, combined with China’s technological prowess, has begun to overtake liberal, American ideals that promote freedom of information. The Great Firewall addresses the origins of the Chinese internet, the individuals responsible for the development of the country’s surveillance apparatus, how the Chinese Communist Party and the state internet work in tandem to support economic policy, and how the world has begun to split along authoritarian and liberal lines, each of which is supported by a technological and economic powerhouse in China or America. Readers who wish to develop a comprehensive, technical understanding of China’s firewall will be somewhat satisfied, but they should prepare themselves for a more human, political approach to the topic, than one that is overtly technical. My key takeaways from the book are also more political in nature than they are technical.

In the opening pages, Griffiths ushers his readers into present-day China, to a setting with which most readers are likely familiar: the ongoing, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that arguably began in 2019. He describes protesters who employ encrypted telecommunication apps to circumvent government censors and monitors, in addition to their iconic umbrellas used to combat physical attacks from authorities. Griffiths transitions from the protests to a geopolitical and historical account of China’s internet, acknowledging how Chinese officials quickly recognized the duality of the internet as a tool for both rebellion and suppression in the early 1990s. Through this lens, Griffiths describes how members of the Tibetan diaspora were closely monitored by Chinese authorities once they developed access to the internet; he details how the Uighurs, the ethnic minority population that inhabits the northwestern Xinjiang region of China, experienced complete internet blackouts as government-backed Internet Service Providers locked down the region in response to violent disputes taking place between Uighurs and the ethnic majority Han population in the opposite corner of the country. A picture began to come into focus: one in which China has exploited the internet to interrupt communication within groups that threatened the state-established status quo.

The government also employs legions of human censors that supervise message boards and forums, flagging discordant information and promoting the party line through direct engagement with the supervised forums. After decades of development, the “great firewall,” which operates on an internal, national level and also filters information from international sources, automatically detects and removes undesirable content, such as pornography or speech disapproving of the CCP. Though Griffiths describes somewhat rudimentary blacklists, which include domains and IPs that are prevented both from circulation within China and from entering the country, I suspect that the advent of machine learning is bringing more effective censorship and surveillance techniques to the firewall. Griffiths does not address such advances.

The “great firewall” also counts the majority of Chinese tech firms among its organs. The CCP, having rebuffed the attempts of American technology giants, such as Facebook and Google, to penetrate the Chinese market, has worked with local innovators — frequently veterans of the People’s Liberation Army — to develop technologies native to China that can compete with American firms. Among these are the aforementioned Huawei, ByteDance (the original developer of TikTok), and Alibaba, as well as Google emulator Baidu and technology conglomerate Tencent, which operates the ubiquitous “super-app”, WeChat. These corporations, in addition to almost every technology startup in China, agree to self-censor and report dissidents to the CCP.

Given the ever-expanding role that these monoliths play in regular Chinese life, citizens are largely unable to avoid using the very technologies that are designed to regulate the style and content of their communication. All the information citizens can access online has been pre-approved by the company or individual that provides it; in turn, it has been approved by the CCP. The complete system, with state-backed individual censors, automated ISP monitors, and technology companies that act as their own watchdogs for fear of government repercussion, is unavoidable for Chinese denizens, especially as their methods of communication and education convert to virtual spaces over more traditional formats.

The implications of this constant surveillance — be it human or automated — are widespread. Political dissidents can be identified and tracked, with real-world consequences. Griffiths describes several groups and individuals that have been forced to move abroad due to their pro-democracy or anti-CCP views. Vocal dissidents who are unable to leave the country are often arrested.

Towards the end of The Great Firewall, Griffiths describes a social credit system, similar to that of Black Mirror’s Nosedive, that is enabled by the omnipresent surveillance apparatus. Supported by Tencent’s WeChat, the social credit system “derives from a plan announced by the State Council in 2014 to establish a nationwide tracking and credit system, combining financial and other data with people’s fingerprints and biometrics,” writes Griffiths. “For those with good credit, the benefits can be tangible: they can rent rooms without a deposit, get upgraded on flights, or receive free gifts when they apply for loans. For those at the opposite end of the scale, things are far more difficult: prices go up, they are often denied services, and they can even be prevented from traveling.” (281, One app to rule them all). Griffiths continues to portray how the credit system penalizes citizens for affiliating with those with low credit, forcing individuals to improve their credit for the good of family and friends and incentivizing them to disengage from those friends and family members with low social credit. “Actions that can cause deductions include missing a restaurant reservation, cheating in an online game, and jaywalking; while good deeds such as donating blood or recycling can boost a user’s score,” Griffiths continues. (282, One app to rule them all) This dystopian system unabashedly attempts to control Chinese citizens’ behavior, and it probably ranks as my most grotesque discovery from The Great Firewall. Though the technology to implement such a system is rejected in societies with more liberal values and exceeds the technological abilities of the majority of nations that would employ it, times are changing.

Griffiths introduces, in the final third of his book, the global debate surrounding internet censorship and cyber-sovereignty. He positions societies on two sides of issue. More censorious states, such as China, Russia, and Uganda, support the notion of cyber-sovereignty, which is isolationist in nature and posits that every state should have control over the information and communication that take place within its established borders. America and its allies, often European, support the opposite: a globalist vision, with interconnectivity and a free flow of information between nations, regardless of geographic boundaries. Proponents of the Chinese vision argue that America, in particular, poses a danger to the rest of the world, as its technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been used to destabilize nations across the world, citing Iranian protests in 2009 that, according to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were energized through American social media companies. To boot, the U.S. State Department even asked Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, to postpone regularly scheduled maintenance during the protests, as Iranian revolutionaries were using the platform to communicate. Proponents of cyber-sovereignty suggest, apparently somewhat reasonably, that American technological dominance threatens international world order, as users around the globe have become increasingly reliant on American firms for information and communication. And China offers the technology to subvert that American interference with sovereign affairs.

China has engaged governments around the world, notably Russia and those in Africa and South America, to offer Chinese censorship and surveillance technologies to governments that wish to impose such restrictions on their national internet. As a result, authoritarian-leaning states have begun to track their own dissidents and detain those who mock or defy their regimes, such as Stella Nyanzi, an activist who likened her Ugandan president to a pair of buttocks on Facebook. In response to her post, Nyanzi was jailed in a maximum-security prison for thirty-three days.

China’s influence has also extended from governments to businesses and private citizens, through its economic might. Griffiths cites the Marriott Hotel chain, an employee of which unwittingly committed a gaff that sent shockwaves through the company in January 2018. The employee, who operated Marriott’s Twitter account, accidentally “liked” a tweet from Friends of Tibet, a pro-independence lobbyist group, who had congratulated Marriott’s inclusions of Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in a drop-drown menu of an email that asked customers to provide their country of address. Although Tibetans might claim independence from China, the Chinese state certainly considers the region of Tibet as its own, as it does with Taiwan and Hong Kong. “Craig Smith, president of the hotel chain’s Asia Pacific office, gave a groveling apology to the state-run China Daily,” (309, Epilogue) writes Griffiths, in response to the employee’s mistake. Marriott Hotels’ implicit endorsement of Tibetan independence, via Tibet’s inclusion in the hotel chain’s drop-down menu, invited Chinese nationalists to hunt for similar inadvertent endorsements from other companies around the world. Griffiths describes how Delta Airlines, apparel retailer Zara, and Mercedes-Benz, among others, were discovered to have made similar faux pas on their social media pages or platforms, and the companies were forced to make an unexpected decision: to include China’s contentiously autonomous regions in their media and risk losing Chinese business or to scrub the regions from their platforms. Even I, an individual, have grappled with my decision to publish this review, for fear of potential future backlash, should I ever be in a position where my stance on Taiwanese autonomy or Chinese censorship is scrutinized.

Upon my completion of The Great Firewall, I was left with a wariness of modern technology and a greater understanding of how these new technologies, which increasingly dominate our lives, offer governments the ability to control our exposure to information and to therefore manipulate our behavior. I also have developed an appreciation for the free flow of information I enjoy as an American (to the extent private companies don’t self-censor), even if that freedom is accompanied by a responsibility to critically evaluate the information I encounter online. So accept this review with a grain of salt, I suppose.

Griffiths, who has spent considerable time on the ground in China, does take care to address each position charitably, and he discusses the technological nuances and geopolitical implications of “the great firewall” with expertise and enthusiasm. I recommend his book to anyone whose interests include technology, geopolitics, and China.