Great Chinese Firewall

Chinese Internet content is overseen by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), which has published the rules and regulations for Internet content within China.

CNNIC is also managed through regional and city Internet Centre Provider (ICP) certifications. Chinese businesses require this ICP certification before they publish on the internet in China.

The CNNIC oversees all publications on the Internet in China, e.g.

• Websites
• Social media
• Videos
• APPs
• etc

These rules generally apply to overseas internet content. However, they are not typically enforced for overseas internet content, given that most overseas websites are challenging to open.

The exception is overseas social media, where there is no agreement with the overseas social media company to limit access to their content within China in line with published IPC rules and regulations.

The overseas press and businesses often call this the Great Chinese Firewall.

Many Chinese internet rules and regulations protect users and consumers from content that can mislead, misinform, and promote harmful ideas.

Although most business content is not directly affected, a website's content can have a significant impact.

China use two methods to block content.

• By blocking the IP address. All content on a blocked IP address can not be seen in China
• By considerably slowing down international internet traffic for specific IP addresses. A website page will take 5 to 10 minutes to load; e.g., most Google IP addresses are affected. In our opinion, this method of blocking content is the most effective. If you have Google files on your website, as most websites do, your website takes a long time to be seen in China.

While there are many views on whether this is good or bad, we recommend respecting local rules and regulations if you wish to do business with someone in another part of the world.

Generally, these are the areas that are not available in China.

• Political commits - some political commits are not allowed. Chinese social media is increasingly used for news information, not overseas internet content. Most international news is available in China, but it is not widely read.
• Social Media—Most international social media is blocked in China. LinkedIn, which closed its Chinese business a few years ago, is the exception.
• Pornographic - not allowed on the internet in China.
• Google—While most Google products and services are not blocked, they are so slow to access that they are unusable.

In the business world, which Access to China focuses on, restrictions on overseas Social Media and Google can hinder or prevent your internet content from being seen.

In the case of overseas social media, most of it is inaccessible from China.

These are examples of international social media platforms accessible from China that are subject to occasional changes.

Another example is when Social Media is inaccessible in China, but a replacement product is available.

While YouTube is not available in China, many “like” services are, the biggest of which is YouKu. In this example, you can upload your business videos to YouKu.

YouKu is similar to YouTube, but with Advertisements often interrupting the video screening.

In business, while YouTube/YouKu is a quick method of loading a video, embedding the video inside your internet content will typically require more work but will give better results.

This is an example of a Chinese "Like" product that surpasses overseas products in terms of local performance in mainland China.

Dropbox is available in mainland China. However, the download speed of Dropbox data is slow in China. A better solution is Baidu Pan, which is now part of Baidu Cloud services.

Although Baidu Pan's data loading may be slower from outside China, access speeds within China are significantly faster.

While many overseas social media platforms are unavailable in China, many local Chinese replacements exist.

This brings me to the last and most important group of services unavailable in China: internet content and tools supplied by Google.

The above are examples of Google not being available in China. This statement is technical and not correct. Google services are available in China, but they are slowed down to a response time of minutes. This results in loading internet content using Google, which takes 5 to 10 minutes. To add to the confusion, they sometimes work, but other days they don't.

Example: Google Fonts—Internet content often uses Google fonts to format text, etc. If you use Google Fonts loaded from a Google server, your internet content may not load within 5 minutes.

Our services can help resolve these issues. We recommend testing your internet content from China – Chinese visible test.