Google and the Great Firewall: An Interesting New Twist

In a post that went up a few minutes ago on its official "Inside Search" blog, Google offers some fascinating tips on "improving our user experience" for people inside mainland China. As a background reminder: after its showdown with the Chinese government two years ago, Google moved its Chinese search servers outside the mainland, to Hong Kong. People in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere on the mainland can still use Google, but their queries must pass through "Great Firewall" filters on their way out to Hong Kong and then back in again.

One valuable part of this new post is a video that vividly conveys how it feels to run searches from inside the Great Firewall. As I argued years ago (and in these recent updates), the brilliance of the multi-layered screening systems that together make up the Firewall is that they are neither airtight nor fully predictable. Unless you are brazenly searching for some obviously taboo term, you're never certain what exactly has triggered a blockage -- or, often, whether your query is being blocked at all, versus your having run into some routine internet problem.

The first minute or so of the video shows what this is like from the user's end -- indeed, how it felt to me about 36 hours ago, when I was trying to do some searches in Shanghai. You enter one query, and it works fine. Then you enter a seemingly similar one -- and, inexplicably, your internet connection seems to die for a while. Then, after a "penalty box" period (whose existence or duration is never explained to you), it comes back. Please do watch:
 

The post then goes on to explain ways in which users can unintentionally run afoul of the Great Firewall, and how they might avoid doing so. For instance: a significant number of "harmless" searches end up being blocked because of coincidental overlap with sensitive names. The post gives the example of the character 江, Jiang, which means "river" and is part of many normal Chinese words and names. (For instance, a famous resort town is named Lijiang, 丽江, and the the Yangtze River is written 长江, Chang Jiang.) But 江 is a "sensitive" character for the Firewall, presumably because it's the family name of the former president Jiang Zemin, 江泽民. Therefore if you are looking for information about the Yangtze River and you innocently enter its normal Chinese name, 长江, you can end up in the penalty box.

The post gives many more details, and explains a new Google search utility that will pop up to warn users in China when they may be getting into trouble without realizing it. For instance, here is what they would see if they entered the Yangtze River / 长江 query:

There is much more at the post, which is worth study on the ongoing rich question of China's conflicted embrace of the Internet. This is a first reaction on my part; more after I've looked at it further and heard from friends in China about how much difference this makes. And for now, congrats to Google for revealing some of what it has learned about a system whose effectiveness has been magnified by its mystery.

Update. A reader adds this point:

I like it; it's not only helpful, but serves as a constant, in-your-face reminder to users in China that the government is censoring search results to such an extent that even seemingly innocuous words can get one's connection interrupted.  In other words; it's a passive aggressive way for Google to point out just how insecure the Chinese government is. 

James Fallows is a staff writer at The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the 2018 book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which was a national best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.

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