Cat and mouse

摘要

The history of the internet in China is one of give and take, of punch and counterpunch, where the authorities are often surprised by the force and speed of online interactions but determined to keep them under control. The result has been a costly and diverse industrial complex of monitoring and censorship. Central-government ministries have invested in two pillars of control: the Great Firewall, a Western name for a system of blocking foreign websites, starting in the late 1990s, which some believe has cost as much as $16om (the details are state secrets); and Golden Shield for domestic surveillance and filtering, begun in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security and estimated to have cost more than $1.6 billion so far.