The Great Firewall of China prevents internet users from fully appreciating the internet. Despite having the largest internet market in the world, China has an average internet speed of approximately 75 kb/s – less than half than that of the global average. How does the slow internet connection speed interrupt China’s economic growth and what is China going to do about it?
Much has been discussed about the huge investment that China has been putting into almost every aspect of its economy: infrastructure, education, environment, agriculture, health, and the list goes on and on. Yet, if there is one crucial area in which China has been lagging behind, it is the internet, and the main reason why the internet has been left back is the Great Firewall of China.
The Great Firewall of China is merely an expression that describes how the China Internet system works. China has the largest internet market in the world; More than 477 million people use the internet in China today, and the number keeps rising every year. But it is not only the number of people who are using the internet that is on the rise: Telegeography reports that the average time spent surfing the web was 19.8 hours per week in China. In contrast, Americans spend an average of 13 hours online a week, according to a Harris Interactive poll from December, 2010.
It is hard to describe the feeling of using the internet in China: The connection is often too slow to surf the web, not too mention the fact that many websites are censored and unaccessible due to the Great Firewall of China: You can forget about Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, and there have been occasions that the New York Times or Linkedin have been blocked as well. But, recently, the situation has gotten much worse: Google, and specifically Gmail, is occasionally unaccessible in China. Google issued a statement last March in which it accuses China of tempering with its services: “We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail, and there is no technical issue on our side.”
The Great Firewall of China
For our readers who are out of China and who did not have the “fortune” to experience the Great Firewall of China, it is difficult to describe the frustration one experiences from not being able to surf the web properly, especially in Asia, which homes some of the fastest internet connection countries in the world such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. According to the latest report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released in January, the average internet speed in Shanghai is 73.2 kb/s (!!!). To compare, the average internet speed in neighboring Japan is 60 mb/s (60,000 kb/s) – almost 1000 times as fast as the average speed in Shanghai, while in the U.S the average internet speed is 5 mb/s (5000 kb/s) – more than 70 times as fast as that in China.
It is hard to estimate the cost of the slow internet connection to China’s economy: An investment banker who cannot send an e-mail to his client or a supplier who cannot reach his buyers are a few examples of potential money loss that occurs on a daily basis because of the Great Firewall of China. More importantly, if China wishes to become more innovative (as defined in the 12th five year plan), it must provide with faster and freer internet connections. Currently, the average internet speed in China is less than half than that of the global average. These data mean that many internet start ups might choose to relocate from China or not to start their business in China, because they will constantly need to deal with internet problems; A situation which is a loss for China and for the world.
Despite the above, things might be changing: Last April, China approved a stimulus plan that is calling for a $22 billion US investment in fiber optic networks that will establish more than 80 million fiber broadband ports by the end of 2011. To increase the deployment of the technology, the stimulus program will provide tax incentives and subsidies to domestic fiber broadband equipment manufacturers as well as to vendors of optical chips and optical modules. China’s internet providers have set up goals for themselves: China Telecom wants to deliver 100 Mbp/s speeds by 2013, and China Mobile hoping to do the same in five years.
What About the Great Firewall?
It is difficult to quantify the value of a fast internet connection, yet it is clear that fast internet symbolizes advancement and progressiveness. A huge population that uses a 100 mbp/s internet connection speed will help drive innovation and will put China on the map as one of the most attractive business locations in the world. Fast internet means faster ways to convey information, thus making it that much easier for people in China to engage in global business and to connect with the rest of the world.
One can only hope that an increase in the internet speed in China will occur in the next few years. Until then, we will have no choice but to refresh our web-pages and to restart our routers and modems on an hourly basis.
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Lior Paritzky is the Editor in Chief and Manager of Laowaiblog, an internet platform that provides opinion and views about social phenomena in modern China. Look for Lior on Twitter: Liorpari 
The internet in China is so slow that I am actually considering going back to the States just because of that. It is impossible, at times, to use the internet here, and it just feels like a third world country in that sense. This needs to change, fast…
I used to live in China and felt the same way. I moved to South Korea, its Incredible. they have 100Mb here as a standard speed. its so fast. and no censorship except for child pornography sites.
I want to point out that although the internet speed might be slow in China, it does not affect Chinese websites as much as it does foreign websites. Whenever I try to go to foreign websites my connection is much slower than if I just surf the Chinese ones
Just returned from Shanghai. I have to say the connection speed for oversea websites is painfully slow. But the local connections are blazing fast. Tried Qiyi iPad apps, the playback is so smooth (and also free and legitimate). Unfortunately some of latest movies are not available in the States, the same reason Netflix is not available outside of US.
I’m a co-founder of a startup that utilizes a fast internet connection for its core technology.
We were considering leveraging the “cheap” manpower in China for our needs and open an office there, but after evaluating the international internet speed we’ve decided to abandon the idea and go for Thailand.
We’ve had similar findings to what Lisa describes, and it seems that the bottle neck is the international gateway.
Im rely pissed of with the internet service of China. The international website’s are too slow that makes it really annoying for me to use. Ya, it’s true that Chinese website are fast enough but being a foreigner neither do i understand or use these website. The sensor ship of different site made internet even so limited that it’s too difficult to get in touch with my friend’s away to my country.There problem with yahoo too. Yahoo uses small amount of internet but here when i use it i feel like I am using some heavy site taking lot of time even to sign in. And time and again it get’s disconnected. China need’s a small effort over this internet service as it has been doing better in ever thing except networking, I hope the problem will be solved as soon as possible.
sure,the internet connection in china is slow.maybe too many people use it,and always 2 to 6 users share one internet wire,it is so crazy!
I agree with you, while the domestic web sites could be blazing fast, the international ones are not so much. The slow speed not only affects English web site, but also web sites in other languages that are not filtered by the Great Wall as much.
Dailymotion, Google App Engine, Blogspot, Flickr, YouTube are all not reliable or inaccessible at times or completely. I thought about building some web applications using existing API provided by those services but had to completely change my approach. Something that I could build to be accessible in the U. S. or U. K. will cease to be useful completely accessed from China.
Financial web sites can be slow too. Stock trading some times takes half a minute to load, by which time the price already dropped another 1% or 3%, and I just lost $1000.
Even POP connection can be unreliable and slow.
There are signs of improvement, Wikipedia, CNN, BBC are all accessible now whereas they were blocked before. With time, China Ministry of Information will become more practical and realize their errors.
I think we are making some assumptions, here, that are not valid. As if the Chinese government would give a f**k about us laowai not being able to access our sites and services. And, in fact, they love it that international services are useless, here, because it provides a chance to locals copying the technology and developing the business. And, in fact, that’s what has happened and is happening all the time, with alternatives to google, youtube, facebook, twitter, for which they can carefull monitor chatter, as well. And I am sure they’d be happy with local ‘innovation’ in API service providers and the like.
Surely, it’s all deliberate. Also, backbone, as well as, in the home/building technology is catching up fast. In theory, internet should be fast, already, and, in fact, it is for the local sites with almost no exception. For example, the Chinese, they love listening to songs and watching videos. I am sure, a popular video clip comes out and you’d be astonished to the bandwidth required, which, as it seems, is nicely met. The locals aren’t really complaining or know what we are talking about.
The Great Firewall of China is plainly a strategic effort to disable foreign business to flourish, enabling locals to copy/paste then grow, to chase ‘misconduct’ (in the eyes of the Chinese government) and to continue to tightly control public opinion.
You can bypass all Internet restrictions in China with a VPN Service like http://www.highspeedvpn.com/, so I wouldn`t worry much about the GFW. Problem is, it`s very hard to get a Internet broadband connection here, I don`t know anyone with more than 4 Mbps.
As an American academic bound for a semester of teaching in Chongqing, I have two questions:
(1) Is using my iPhone a good option? Do you advise having it cracked and a sym card installed, or? and
(2) Any advice on getting over the Great Firewall?–proxy server, VPN service, or the US gov’t funded client side software “Freegate”?
Thanx!
EcoRover:
1. Using your iPhone is fine. You can get reasonably cheap plans from China Unicom that will include data although it might require some language help to communicate if your mandarin isn’t very good, a friendly native speaker will be able to put the right settings into your phone. There’s no real reason to jailbreak your phone, service is basically the same as anywhere else in the world except that you’ll find browsing to non-Chinese mainland sites quite often very slow.
2. There are some free VPN services but I would recommend purchasing one for a year because the free ones are frequently made redundant where as paid services will provide you with new information to connect if/when old servers are shut down. I’ve needed to update my VPN info about 3-4 times in the last 12 months mostly around March-June when the PRC got twitchy about some internal politics here. Services such as Witopia and Astrill will set you back around $50 US a year and will allow you to connect from your iPhone as well as your laptop or work computer.
Hope that helps.
I am in CQ now and I know an English teacher here who could help/advice you because I know he has such bypass software to use the usually blocked sites as youtube etc….
you can email me and I can forward you his email address
pleas send me that software help to access the internet sites in china
Also should have added: your iPhone will still use your American iStore account so nothing really changed. I’m Australian with Aus iStore registered account and that is still used for my iPad so I get all the releases any other Australian would.
Does anybody have clear evidence whether the slow speed is caused by the filter or just limited by the bandwidth between Chinese network and outside world?
I experienced the same slow internet symptoms in the Philippines and now I am in China. Some pages will only load when you retype the website address (then Enter) for second or third time and ALWAYS will not appear at first try…
In my opinion the slow internet of OVERSEASE websites is caused because there are too many ‘hops’ between China and let’s say European websites. [hops are the number of steps between routers from A to B, let's say you try to open a website in France from a internet connection in Guangzhou, hop1) Guangzhou to Shanghai, hop2) Shanghai to Beijing, hop3) Beijing to HK, hop4) HK to Amsterdam, hop5) Amsterdam to London, hop6) London to Paris etc.]. I have no full knowledge but while in Philippines the large number of hops made it nearly impossible to do work from there and in China I experience the same.
The other thing is the partly blocked websites, but that has nothing to do with slow websites. Gmail might or might not work, google gives back results or no results depending on when and where in China you try this. In my opinion there is some system behind the scenes that slow things down on certain websites, but they try to avoid it will look like ‘blocked’ websites.
The last phenomen are the complete blocked websites for whatever reason: such as Youtube…
Please add or correct me where I am wrong or incomplete!
Hello,
this is true that without using a vpn the internet connection in china is too slow ;(
the disappointing part is that there are many people that would be able to make better use of faster networking capabilities.thinking about the advertising markets that are wasted simply because they can’t get through to more than a billion people.kind of pointless really to have a massive firewall that keeps out the rest of the world when it’s only making it harder for their own people