NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE
BEIJING — THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Last updated Thursday, Jan. 01 2015, 5:59 PM EST
China, the country that perfected breaking the Internet, has of late been on a campaign to convince the rest of the world that its approach to digital networks is worth spreading. (Sim Chi Yin For The Globe and Mail)
It has been the strangest kind of charm offensive.
China, the country that perfected breaking the Internet, has of late been on a campaign to convince the rest of the world that its approach to digital networks is worth spreading. It’s an effort led by Lu Wei, the man whose chief responsibilities include overseeing the Great Firewall of China, whose heavy veil of censorship is responsible for the damage China has done to the Internet inside its borders.
In November, Mr. Lu was among the headline speakers at China’s first-ever World Internet Conference, which featured corporate guests from around the globe. In December, he flew to Silicon Valley and visited Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos. He appeared at a Washington Internet forum co-hosted by Microsoft and attended by senior U.S. officials. A few days later, he published an article in the Huffington Post that, in a tidy 1,397 words, laid out China’s vision for what the Internet should look like.
It’s a dramatic change from China’s historically favoured way of expressing its Internet views: the silent display of error messages instead of websites it doesn’t like, the deletion of social media posts it considers improper and the banning of foreign companies that won’t toe its line. The latest appears to be Google, whose search and Gmail products have been largely blocked since late spring.