Total Surveillance: Gigantic "Golden Shield" Project - How China is Attacking Our Internet

China wants to become the world's leading digital power. President Xi Jingping wants nothing less than to create his own Internet. An Internet in which Western values such as freedom and privacy do not exist. What is in store for us?

Today, Westerners take it for granted that national borders are meaningless on the Internet and that we can inform ourselves freely. By contrast, we traditionally look with a mixture of pity and incomprehension at countries like China, where the Internet is supposedly lagging behind our development.

We underestimate the fact that China wants to go its own way and is actively shaping its own Internet according to the ideas of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The goal is to create its own Chinese-dominated worldwide Internet, but separate from the West. To this end, the "Golden Shield" project was launched back in 1998. Under the direction of the Ministry of State Security of the People's Republic, it was put into operation for the first time in 2003.

China's digital wall: How the "Golden Shield" project works

Golden Shield is comparable in its functions to a private firewall. It blocks certain data packets according to defined rules before they can reach the local network from the Internet. For example, IP addresses, domain names, URLs or data packets containing defined keywords can be blocked. Private firewalls keep out viruses and malware, China unwelcome content. This includes foreign social media or uncensored press. Metaphorically speaking, China has built a mighty - this time digital - wall. In front of the wall, Western freedom of information applies; behind the wall, China's Golden Shield algorithm determines the supply of information.

The West is still making the mistake of viewing this Internet as a relative of the "real" Internet, but one that is identical in nature and just full of errors. For too long, either out of ignorance or spoiled by success, it has clung to the idea that its cultural foundation of the Internet is immutable and universal and will naturally prevail. China, however, is increasingly positioning itself to expose this as a misconception. From a geostrategic perspective, the African continent will play a central role in this.

Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, Vivo: China has caught up in terms of hardware since long

Technologically, China has already been rapidly catching up. The days of Chinese hardware being low-powered cheap alternatives that rank far behind products from Apple, Samsung and Sony are over. Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, Vivo, and OnePlus all make competitive smartphones and laptops for the consumer and business markets. In addition, the Chinese leadership has pushed a positive technology climate among the population for decades while drastically reducing analog processes. There is no opportunity for technology disenchantment for Chinese citizens - at least in the cities. There, their entire lives can be organized through apps, from bus tickets to grocery deliveries to vehicle registration.

However, China's technology repertoire does not end with digital end devices, but is completed by digital network infrastructure from domestic production. The 5G debate over the role of network equipment supplier Huawei from 2018 and 2019 has revealed that only the U.S. and China have relevant businesses in this technology sector. But digital infrastructure determines the speed and therefore the usefulness of the Internet.

In a country with slow or poorly available internet, no AI, streaming, and certainly no virtual reality offerings are possible. Only modern network infrastructure will be able to handle the exploding volume of data. Cisco Systems, for example, predicts that monthly global Internet traffic will average 396 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) in 2022. Compared to 2016, this is more than a fourfold increase.

Having mastered the key technologies of digitization and, with the Golden Shield, also being able to control its Internet users in terms of power politics and culture, China has been aggressively exporting this overall package to the African continent for several years. There, it hopes to increase its digital and economic agitation space, separate from the Western digital single market.

China's potential lies in the enormous reach of the cultural area

This is an undertaking that not only makes strategic sense, but is also promising at the moment. For digital business models in particular, a critical market size is indispensable in order to be able to scale business models sufficiently. China already has a potential digital economic area with 1.38 billion people who use the Internet not according to Western standards and in English, but according to Chinese languages and rules. By comparison, the entire "Western" Internet, the American continent, Europe, Australia and smaller parts of Asia currently add up to a potential market of around 2 billion people.

Africa is therefore an almost perfect market for China to expand the Internet according to its own cultural ideas and to outclass the West: It currently has 1.3 billion inhabitants and is the fastest growing continent on earth. In 2020, fertility was 4.4 children per woman. By 2050, the population is expected to have doubled. Room for growth in digital exists. According to Internet World Stats, only 46.7 percent of the African population has Internet access to date. This still puts Africa far behind Asia (59.6 percent) and North America (89.9 percent). But it is precisely the unoccupied markets that are interesting, where instead of attacking, you just have to access.

At the moment, the African domestic market admittedly does not have much purchasing power. In the Western world, purchasing power is between 10,000 and 65,000 U.S. dollars, with a median of around 40,000 U.S. dollars per year per capita. In China, on the other hand, it is around 11,000 U.S. dollars, and in Africa it is more like 1,000 to 2,000 U.S. dollars. However, the emerging countries of Africa with their young populations that are ready to catch up are particularly well suited for digital business models whose services can be offered at low cost and then scaled at virtually no additional cost. Those who don't have much yet want to have a lot, and where no old structures have to be overtaken, their own standards can be set quickly.

China's opportunity: Africa can be digitized from zero to a hundred

In many African countries, for example, several intermediate steps in technological development can be skipped. Instead of waiting for copper and then fiber optic lines, a cell tower is erected right away. Instead of first setting up a bank and using its app, a fintech with a digital currency is used right away. After all, in some parts of Africa, even the possession of cash is a security risk. Africa can thus be digitized from "zero to one hundred," as it were.

That's where China comes in, first by exporting infrastructure, then applications, and with them its own version of the Internet: Angola, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, China has invested in digital infrastructure in all of these countries, already overtaking the West as the continent's largest direct investor since 2012. Logically, while building this infrastructure, China is also establishing its own standards with hardware and software products - conveniently, this makes it very easy to implement the Golden Shield at the same time.

China gives prosperity and jobs and takes away privacy and freedom

Thus, behind the Golden Shield, China is in the process of creating a larger, economically attractive, powerful and thus geopolitically highly attractive Internet. This has a good chance of overtaking the Western Internet, because economic action is the real driver of progress on the Internet.

China has thus taken its own soft-power path in the digital to "colonize Africa." Those who create wealth in Africa through jobs and opportunities for (digital) participation with faster and better applications will not be asked any more questions about access to Twitter, What's App and Co for the time being. China, with the catalyst of economic development, can efficiently drive its policy and culture export. The experience of politically motivated investment programs, as in post-war Germany, Japan and South Korea, shows how promising this strategy is. With economic success comes cultural dominance. In China's case, for example, the cultural heritage includes a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between state and citizen, or a completely different definition of "good" and "bad" states and conflicts.

By dominating the digital world, China would divide the world into two large Internet camps, each with its own language, technology, culture, and worldview. The starting signal for a real geopolitical competition of systems in the digital realm has already been given. The West must now begin to catch up and pursue its interests just as clearly if it does not want to soon be sitting on an "old and lame" Internet.