Opening a Public Sphere in China
The prevailing answer is no: China’s “Great Firewall” of Internet filter- ing and control prevents the rise of an independent public sphere online. Indeed, China’s policing of the Internet is extraordinary in both scope and sophistication. China now has the world’s largest population of Internet users—more than 380 million people (a number equal to 29 percent of the population, and a sixteen-fold increase since the year 2000). But it also has the world’s most extensive, “multilayered,” and sophisticated system “for censoring, monitoring, and controlling activities on the internet and mobile phones.”8 Connection to the international Internet is monopolized by a handful of state-run operators hemmed in by rigid constraints that produce in essence “a national intranet,” cut off from anything that might challenge the CCP’s monopoly on power. Access to critical websites and online reporting is systematically