The United States House of Representatives held a hearing on the Great Firewall of China. Experts warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is laying out a blueprint for a digital authoritarian state and has exported surveillance technology to dozens of countries.
Experts at the meeting urged the U.S. Congress to allocate funds for developing circumvention technology to help Chinese citizens bypass the CCP’s firewall, enabling them to seek the truth on their own.
On Tuesday morning, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the CCP held a hearing titled “The Great Firewall and the CCP’s Export of its Techno-Authoritarian Surveillance State.”
During the hearing, the committee invited Nat Kretchun, Deputy Director of the Open Technology Fund, Zack Cooper, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Xiao Qiang, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, to share their perspectives.
Chairman of the committee, Republican Federal Representative John Moolenaar, stated that the CCP’s firewall is an issue of “strategic importance.”
He pointed out, “With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge technologies, the CCP’s censorship cadre monitors all information and speech within China, swiftly removing any content that deviates from the Party line.”
At the hearing, Xiao Qiang, Director of the Information School at UC Berkeley, advocated for the U.S. Congress to allocate funds for developing new circumvention technology and decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help the Chinese people overcome the “Great Firewall” set up by Beijing.
The Great Firewall of China refers to the CCP’s online censorship system, which analyzes, filters foreign network information, blocks certain foreign websites, and conducts strict internet censorship within China. Experts warned that the CCP is using the firewall to completely isolate the Chinese internet ecosystem from the rest of the global internet.
Xiao Qiang stated, “The CCP is offering the world a blueprint for establishing a digital authoritarian state, posing a real threat to global peace.”
Despite the U.S. government funding traditional circumvention tools like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in China, expert witnesses noted that these tools are insufficient. They believe that the CCP has intensified criminal convictions and implemented other suppressive measures to prevent people from using these tools.
“CCP’s increasingly strict information control measures have inflicted great harm on the Chinese people,” warned Zack Cooper, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, adding, “The Great Firewall is not only a barrier for the Chinese people but also becoming an obstacle in U.S.-China relations.”
Cooper emphasized that as the CCP constantly vilifies the U.S. and distorts American society, history, and policies to spread anti-American sentiment, this could escalate crises and conflicts between the U.S. and China.
He also stated that the “techno-authoritarian tools” developed by the CCP are spreading abroad and will pose a global threat in the coming years.
“The authoritarian tools developed in Beijing will not stay confined to China. Over the past decade, the CCP has exported surveillance technology to more than eighty countries worldwide,” said Cooper. “These tools will be adopted by dictators in Russia, Iran, and other regions.”
Xiao Qiang also remarked, “The CCP is advancing a blueprint to establish a digital authoritarian state, posing a real threat to global peace. We must stand united to defend and uphold freedom and dignity domestically and globally.”
Cooper noted that while the CCP collects a vast amount of data on the Chinese people, it is rapidly eliminating Chinese content from the global internet. According to CCP’s own figures, there were over 5 million websites accessible to Chinese citizens in 2017. Since then, this number has dropped by over 20%. Chinese-language websites now only account for 1.3% of the total global websites, down from 4.3% in 2013.
“As a result, the CCP understands its people better than ever before, while the Chinese people have less knowledge of the external world and even the domestic realities,” Cooper said.
Nat Kretchun, Deputy Director of the Open Technology Fund, stated that the CCP has been imposing internet controls for about 15 years, not only constructing an increasingly extensive firewall but actively replacing foreign independent media and free platforms with domestically controlled platforms like WeChat and Weibo. This has created a completely different internet ecosystem.
This has led to a generation of Chinese people who have never experienced the global internet in their upbringing.
“This generation of Chinese people does not yearn for the global internet because… they have never meaningfully experienced it,” Kretchun said, “This is the fundamental challenge we face today.”
He cautioned that the domestic platform ecosystem shaped by the CCP covers almost the entire globe, effectively constraining over 1 billion Chinese citizens.
Kretchun emphasized that despite these challenges, the desire of Chinese internet users for external information still exists.
“In this regard, our role is to provide tools, technology, and platforms that allow users to transcend the walls of China’s online ecosystem, freely express themselves, and connect,” said Kretchun.
Kretchun advocated for supporting internet developers to create innovative circumvention methods tailored to specific usage scenarios, online behaviors, and risk situations.
However, witnesses also stated that breaking down barriers between China and the outside world is not just about focusing on internal issues and censorship. They mentioned that another effective method is to bring Chinese students to the United States.
Cooper said that student exchanges are an “asymmetric advantage” for the U.S.
According to estimates, China hosted over 1,000 American students in the previous academic year, while the U.S. welcomed around 290,000 Chinese students in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Witnesses also urged the U.S. government to support the development of more “objective” content to disseminate to Chinese users and to impose restrictions and sanctions on Chinese technology companies engaged in censorship and surveillance.
Both parties called for breaking free from the information control of the CCP. Chief Democratic member of the committee, Raja Krishnamoorthi, stressed, “We cannot allow the CCP to control the internet; the purpose of the internet is to connect people, not divide and control them… This is a battle America cannot afford to lose.”