Great Firewall Necessary to Keep Out Western Propaganda, Chinese Newspaper Says

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Apr 11, 2016 

Men look at computers in an Internet cafe in Beijing. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images 

China’s Great Firewall isn’t a barrier to trade – it’s only a bulwark against Western propaganda, a Chinese state-run newspaper wants to remind citizens.

The Global Times came to the defense of the country’s Internet censors on Monday as they face renewed criticism from the United States. “History will positively assess the key role of the (Great Firewall) system,” said the paper in an editorial that ran in both Chinese and English.

The U.S. Trade Representative warned last week in an annual trade report that China’s Internet crackdown is worsening and that it is a growing trade obstacle. Eight of the top 25 highest-traffic global websites are now blocked in China, and “much of the blocking appears arbitrary,” the U.S. report said.

China also blocked the websites of Time and The Economist this month after both magazines ran cover articles that compared President Xi Jinping’s governing style to Mao Zedong’s cult of personality.

As one of China’s most strident state-run publications, the Global Times is often on the front lines of defense against foreign criticism. The Global Times argued in its editorial on Monday that the Great Firewall is necessary to keep out “harmful or unsafe information” and to fend off “Western intentions to penetrate China ideologically.”

It’s a familiar tack. When China is faced with questions of censorship, it tends to argue that it needs to defend itself against Western soft power and propaganda. Chinese officials have used similar lines of argument in their promotion of the idea of Chinese “Internet sovereignty” and in the government’s crackdown on foreign TV shows.

China’s concern over U.S. soft power even extended to the new Disney children’s movie “Zootopia.” The military-backed People’s Liberation Army Daily warned last week that viewers should guard against the movie’s stealthy promotion of Western values.

King-Wa Fu, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s journalism school who studies Chinese censorship, said that the discussion of soft power is a diversion from the Great Firewall’s primary purpose of maintaining the Chinese Communist Party’s political control.

“The Chinese Internet control policy is mainly aimed (at securing) the state power’s stability,” he said.

The Global Times editorial suggested that China’s Internet controls could be loosened once the country’s soft power is strong enough to contend against that of the West.

But when could that happen? There was no discussion of a timeline.

–Eva Dou. Follow her on Twitter @evadou.