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The Great Firewall of China is a blanket term thought to have been coined in an article in Wired magazine in 1997  and used ironically by international, including Chinese, media to refer to legislation and projects initiated by the Chinese government (which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP) that attempt to regulate the internet in Mainland China. These CCP attempts at regulation include criminalizing certain online activities, blocking from view selected websites, and filtering key words out of searches from computers located in Mainland China.

History of Internet Usage in China
China did not have a cohesive system of networked computers until 1994. However, internet use in China grew extremely rapidly; while in 1997 there were only 250,000 people online in China, by 1999 that number had grown to 3.5 million. By 2004, there were 80 million users, and as of 2007 there were 162 million users, ranking China just behind the United States (210 million users) in number of people online. However, these numbers should also be framed in the fact that given their respective populations, only 12% of Chinese people are online whereas in the United States, 70% of the population is connected to the internet.

Origins of Chinese Internet Law
While the United States and several other western countries passed laws criminalizing computer crimes beginning in the 1970's, China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC) passed CL97, a law that criminalizes "cyber crimes", which it divided into two categories: crimes that target computer networks and crimes carried out over computer networks.

Many Chinese judges were critical of CL97, calling it ineffective and unenforcable. However, the NPC claimed it intentionally left the law "flexible" so that it could be open to future interpretation and development. Given the gaps in CL97, the PRC's State Council and its local ministries are allowed to define "cyber crime" themselves, and their definitions are not required to go through the NPC legislative process. As a result, the CCP has ended up relying heavily on state regulation to suppress political opposition with the justification that those bodies are responsible for preserving social stability.

Great Firewall
Two broadly defined online activities punishable under CL97 are used as justification for perpetuation of the Great Firewall. These actions include using the internet to distribute information considered "harmful to national security," and using the internet to disseminate information considered "harmful to public order, social stability, and Chinese morality." Again, it is left up to state regulators to determine what types of online behavior and speech fall under these categories, and review by NPC is not required.

As part of the Great Firewall, in 1993, China initiated the Golden Shield Project, a massive surveillance and censoring system manned by both civilians and CCP officials. However, by 200x the project was widely considered ineffectual as individuals had adapted by using proxy servers to circumnavigate to the blocked content.

Moreover, some research evidence has indicated that suspicion of the "Great Firewall" in China and the sense that one is being surveyed online leads to chilled speech and self-censorship, which has been more effective at blocking internet content than any Chinese project or law has been.

Effectiveness of
The CCP has had some success in filtering key words out of internet searches and blocking access to selected sites. For example, web sites for The New York Times and Washington Post were for the lay user inaccessible in Mainland China until 2002.

Internet cafes, which are very popular in China, as of 200x were required to register every customer in a log when they used the internet there.

By 2008, several U.S. internet companies, including Yahoo, Google, and AOL, have made agreements with the Chinese government to filter out certain words from their searches.

Maintenance of
Cisco

Compliance with
Chinese corporate statues mandate that internet companies doing business in Mainland China cooperate with its Great Firewall efforts. The Chinese businesses of American companies Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft comply with this condition of operating there. However, the leadership of these companies regularly express their dismay with China's Great Firewall policies but consider it a necessary part of doing business in China and better than the alternative, which would to not have any China business at all. Jerry Yang, a founder of Yahoo, additionally has implied that foreign internet companies operating in China will eventually help bring about less internet restriction in China