China’s Great Firewall Is Built on Friction-based Censorship, Says Margaret Roberts
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The Great Wall of China is one of Asia’s most photographed and visited landmarks. Built over thousands of years and winding through a total of 13,170 miles, this wide-reaching network of defenses was constructed as a barrier against China’s northern neighbors. But within the digital landscape of China is a much less conspicuous yet far more pervasive set of fortifications: the Great Firewall. China’s state-operated internet is carefully controlled, heavily censored, and designed to keep its own citizens away from information that might damage the power and perception of the Communist Party.
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In Robert’s assessment, the Great Firewall is an example of censorship via what she terms “friction.” Rather than centering on fear, this type of censorship acts as a tax on information, creating small inconveniences that are easy to explain away and requiring those seeking information to spend more time and money if they want access to it. Censorship thus “works through distraction and diversion. It nudges — but does not force — most users away from unsavory material.”
This framing of censorship, Robert says, helps explain why, even though China’s Great Firewall is porous and can be circumvented, the number of people who “jump the wall” using a virtual private network (VPN) remains relatively low. People are not necessarily afraid of legal or political consequences of using a VPN, but rather the process of doing so is deemed too bothersome or offers too little value for the effort in most people’s day-to-day lives.
This friction-driven censorship is, therefore, effective on two levels: it keeps the majority of citizens away from sensitive material by making it too labor-intensive for them to access, and it naturally filters for outlier individuals the government has an interest in monitoring. According to Robert’s data, VPN users are overwhelmingly 35-year-old and younger, tend to be college degree holders, have fluency in English, have traveled or studied outside of China, and are interested in international politics — precisely the kinds of cohorts the Communist Party would benefit from managing more closely.
However, these digital demographics shift dramatically to include much broader groups of people during crises and following abrupt interruptions to citizen’s daily lives. Through analysis of Chinese social media data, online experiments, and nationally representative surveys, Roberts shows how the number of VPN downloads spiked during the devastating Tianjin chemical explosion in 2015 as people scrambled to find information on the disaster. VPN downloads also increased after the shutdown of Instagram on September 29, 2014, following protests in Hong Kong. The Chinese government barred access to the platform to contain posts about the protests, but Roberts says that it was the sudden loss of access to the social media platform’s draw of entertainment that pulled many more “everyday” citizens over the firewall than would be typical. Once over, these new users quickly moved from accessing pictures of pop stars to exploring banned websites and censored information in more political spaces.
This is one of the important takeaways Roberts sees in her work. “This porous nature of censorship . . . means that there’s an Achilles heel of friction, which is that during crises, or sudden, more visible [moments of] censorship, people are willing to seek out that type of information and that can undermine some of these other strategies.”
With the Great Firewall only a few decades old, the full effects of its friction-based barricades remain to be seen, but Roberts is certain that in the coming years, the control of access to and accuracy of online information will have important effects not only on modern China but the future digital world as a whole.
You can learn more about Margaret Robert’s work in her book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall.
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CANCELED: Data-intensive Innovation and the State: Evidence from Facial Recognition AI Firms in China
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IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE:
In keeping with Stanford University's March 3 message to the campus community on COVID-19 and current recommendations of the CDC, the Asia-Pacific Research Center is electing to postpone this event until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we do our best to keep our community healthy and well.
Data-intensive technologies such as AI may reshape the modern world. We propose that two features of data interact to shape innovation in data-intensive economies: first, states are key collectors and repositories of data; second, data is a non-rival input in innovation. We document the importance of state-collected data for innovation using comprehensive data on Chinese facial recognition AI firms and government contracts. Firms produce more commercial software and patents, particularly data-intensive ones, after receiving government public security contracts. Moreover, effects are largest when contracts provide more data. We then build a directed technical change model to study the state's role in three applications: autocracies demanding AI for surveillance purposes, data-driven industrial policy, and data regulation due to privacy concerns. When the degree of non-rivalry is as strong as our empirical evidence suggests, the state's collection and processing of data can shape the direction of innovation and growth of data-intensive economies.
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David Yang
Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics; Department of Economics, Harvard University
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Ming Zeng
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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mingzeng@stanford.edu
Visiting Scholar at APARC
Ming Zeng joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar for the 2020 calendar year from Alibaba Group, where he serves as chairman of the Academic Council and formerly as Chief Strategy Officer, and the Hupan School of Entrepreneurship, where he serves as founding Dean and Professor of Strategy. At APARC, he will be conducting research on innovation and entrepreneurship in the Asia-Pacific, specifically on the globalization of Chinese digital companies across Asia. Prior to coming to APARC, Zeng was a visiting scholar at the Stanford King Center on Global Development at SIEPR.
The PRC at 70: Past, Present -- and Future?
IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE:
China's Economic Development: A Forty Year Perspective
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WE HAVE REACHED VENUE CAPACITY AND ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING RSVPS
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Nicholas R. Lardy is the Anthony M. Solomon Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He joined the Institute in March 2003 from the Brookings Institution, where he was a senior fellow from 1995 until 2003. Before Brookings, he served at the University of Washington, where he was the director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies from 1991 to 1995. From 1997 through the spring of 2000, he was also the Frederick Frank Adjunct Professor of International Trade and Finance at the Yale University School of Management. He is an expert on the Chinese economy. Lardy's most recent books are The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China? (2019), Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China (2014), Sustaining China's Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis (2012), The Future of China's Exchange Rate Policy (2009), and China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (2008).
This event is part of the 2020 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, The PRC at 70: The Past, Present – and Future?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.
Nicholas Lardy
Anthony M. Solomon Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics
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The US, China, and the Technology Cold War: How Washington and Beijing are Shaping the Future of Technology
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IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE:
In keeping with Stanford University's March 3 message to the campus community on COVID-19 and current recommendations of the CDC, the Asia-Pacific Research Center is electing to make this event available through live stream only. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we do our best to keep our community healthy and well.
Please join the live stream via Zoom by clicking here at the scheduled time, 4:30 PM, on March 4 to view Adam Segal's talk.
Analysts on both sides of the Pacific have described an escalating “technology cold war” between Beijing and Washington. Chinese hackers attack American technology companies and Beijing is reportedly planning on the removal of foreign software and hardware from government offices. Washington is blocking Chinese investments, using punitive measures against Huawei and Chinese surveillance companies, and scrutinizing research collaboration with Chinese universities as well as scientists and students. Both sides believe they are in and have to win a race to dominate 5G, AI, quantum, and other emerging technologies. What are the weapons of the tech cold war, and are the US and China doomed to ever more competition, or can they find common ground for cooperation? What does increasing competition between China and the United States mean for the rest of the world?
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Adam Segal
Director
Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program, Council on Foreign Relations
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Population Aging, Productivity, and Technology in Japan
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Japan faces a rapid population decrease and aging. Workers’ aging is negatively associated with labor productivity. For instance, a 10% increase in the fraction of workers aged 55 and above is associated with a 3% decrease in labor productivity. Kawaguchi will present his recent research that assesses the impact of population aging on labor productivity. He will also address whether the adoption of a new technology, such as purchases of industrial robot or information and communications technology (ICT) equipment, can mitigate the negative impact of worker’ aging on labor productivity and what impact, if any, it has on Japan moving forward in addressing its aging population, adoption of new technology, and increasing labor shortage.
SPEAKER
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Daiji Kawaguchi is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Kawaguchi graduated from Waseda University (B.A., 1994), Hitotsubashi University, (M.A., 1996) and Michigan State University (Ph.D., 2002). In addition to his position at U of Tokyo, Kawaguchi is a Research Associate of Tokyo Center for Economic Research. Before joining University of Tokyo faculty in 2016, Kawaguchi was Assistant Professor of Economics at Osaka University (2002-03) and University of Tsukuba (2003-05), and Associate and full Professor at Hitotsubashi University (2005-2016).
Daiji Kawaguchi, Professor of Economics, University of Tokyo
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Aging Japan as Global Opportunity? How Japan’s Extreme Demographics are Shaping Technological Trajectories
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The demographics of Japan’s aging society has galvanized a wide range of corporate efforts, supported both directly and indirectly by the government, to aggressively develop artificial intelligence-driven technologies and IT systems to perform work for which labor shortages are accelerating. We are beginning to see concrete corporate offerings to address shortages of specific types of skilled and unskilled labor, as well as numerous efforts underway to develop systems to cope with sparsely populated, elderly geographic regions and the logistics surrounding eldercare more generally.
In this talk, based on a forthcoming book chapter, Kushida examines specific corporate cases and government strategies suggesting how Japan’s population aging and shrinking has led to three primary interrelated drivers of significance to shaping technological trajectories: 1) Demographics as market opportunity of an entirely unprecedented scale to serve the needs of a rapidly aging society; 2) demographic change creating an acute labor shortage; and 3) favorable political and regulatory dynamics for pursuing the development and diffusion of new technological trajectories to solve social and economic challenges caused by demographic change. A critical implication is that if technologies developed or deployed within Japan to solve domestic demographic problems are applicable elsewhere, then Japan’s demographic challenge can be an opportunity to cultivate competitive products and services in global markets.
SPEAKER
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Kenji E. Kushida is a Japan Program Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and an affiliated researcher at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Kushida’s research interests are in the fields of comparative politics, political economy, and information technology. He has four streams of academic research and publication: political economy issues surrounding information technology such as Cloud Computing; institutional and governance structures of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster; political strategies of foreign multinational corporations in Japan; and Japan’s political economic transformation since the 1990s. Kushida has written two general audience books in Japanese, entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (Chuko Shinsho, 2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (Fusosha, 2008). Kushida holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.
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Kenji E. Kushida
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Former Research Scholar, Japan Program
Kenji E. Kushida was a research scholar with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2014 through January 2022. Prior to that at APARC, he was a Takahashi Research Associate in Japanese Studies (2011-14) and a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-11).
Kushida’s research and projects are focused on the following streams: 1) how politics and regulations shape the development and diffusion of Information Technology such as AI; 2) institutional underpinnings of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, 2) Japan's transforming political economy, 3) Japan's startup ecosystem, 4) the role of foreign multinational firms in Japan, 4) Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. He spearheaded the Silicon Valley - New Japan project that brought together large Japanese firms and the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startup Ecosystem,” "How Politics and Market Dynamics Trapped Innovations in Japan’s Domestic 'Galapagos' Telecommunications Sector," “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).
Kushida has appeared in media including The New York Times, Washington Post, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business, Diamond Harvard Business Review, NHK, PBS NewsHour, and NPR. He is also a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation, alumni of the Trilateral Commission David Rockefeller Fellows, and a member of the Mansfield Foundation Network for the Future. Kushida has written two general audience books in Japanese, entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (Chuko Shinsho, 2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (Fusosha, 2008).
Kushida holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his MA in East Asian Studies and BAs in economics and East Asian Studies with Honors, all from Stanford University.
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