China has one of the lowest rates of cross-border internet traffic in the world, and foreign apps get next to no use inside the country. Asia Society estimated in 2026 that the top five domestic apps drew 1,000 times the traffic of the top five foreign apps blocked by the Great Firewall.
The firewall is a mix of laws and technology. Since 2013 the Cyberspace Administration of China has run it. It blocks selected foreign websites, slows traffic crossing the border, and requires foreign companies to follow domestic rules.
How it works
The system inspects TCP packets for keywords or sensitive words. When one turns up, the connection is shut. If a single link is closed, more links from the same machine get blocked as well.
Censorship is only part of the story. The firewall has also tilted China’s own internet economy toward domestic companies and weakened foreign products. Authorities have rewritten search results for certain terms and pushed global companies to pull content, including apps removed from the Chinese App Store at their request.
Where it came from
The internet reached China in 1994. Two years later Premier Li Peng signed State Council Order No. 195, which required networks connected abroad to use official international channels. It was later used to punish people for “climbing over the firewall.”
Geremie Barmé, an Australian sinologist, put “Great Firewall of China” into print in 1997. A CNN report from Beijing a year earlier had already described authorities adapting firewall devices, built to keep people out of a network, to filter what comes in. The political basis is often traced to Deng Xiaoping’s saying in the early 1980s: “If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in.”
The project itself started in 1998, the year the China Democracy Party was banned. Its first phase lasted eight years, to 2006, and a second ran from 2006 to 2008. The main equipment sits at three large internet exchanges in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Beyond the mainland
Hong Kong and Macau, which keep their own legal systems under “one country, two systems,” are not covered by the firewall. The US State Department has reported that central authorities nonetheless watch internet use there closely, and Hong Kong’s National Security Law has been used to block websites documenting anti-government protests. Within the mainland, some provinces, Henan among them, run their own versions of the firewall.
China’s Wikipedia pages were blocked in stages. The Chinese-language edition went dark in May 2015, and by May 2019 every language version was blocked.
