DeepSeek is the latest Chinese success to lead to renewed discussion in the U.S. about the efficacy of China’s development model, which challenges the West’s persistent inclination to believe that a lack of political rights must stunt economic growth and innovation.
Economic and political interests are certainly in tension when it comes to censorship in China, but the real economic impact of censorship is difficult to measure. China’s unique information environment shaped how Chinese internet giants internationalized — following a pattern of immense growth domestically and then difficulty expanding to foreign markets. But Chinese companies like DeepSeek show that innovation is possible despite constraints.
From the inception of the internet in China in the 1990s, the Chinese government was “interested in basically carving out its own cyberspace that would be mediated by both its cultural and political commitments,” said Bulelani Jili, a PhD candidate at Harvard University specializing in Africa-China relations and internet policy. The Great Firewall was designed in part due to “the assumption … that certain cultural or political influences from the global north would be corrupting to the local politics and potentially destabilizing,” Jili added.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton said of China’s Firewall in 2000, “Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” Just like many China watchers incorrectly believed that the liberalization of China’s economy under Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) would lead to political reform, they also believed that China wouldn’t be able to exert political control over the internet. In fact, the internet developed in such a way that is amenable to centralized control, Nick Merrill, director of the Daylight Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, told Domino Theory.
“China really never joined the internet in the first place … when they connected to what we think of as the internet, they actually didn’t connect in an internet-like way,” said Andrew Sullivan, former president and CEO of the Internet Society. The gateways of entry that connect the global internet to China are limited to three state-controlled telecommunications companies — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — and one academic research network. In contrast with the U.S., private entities in China are not allowed to establish their own networks or do their own routing (i.e., they cannot connect to the internet independently, they must connect through a state-controlled network). This limited connection to the global internet facilitates centralized control, censorship and surveillance.
While “Great Firewall” implies some sort of concrete infrastructure or policy approach, it is in fact diffuse — a collection of regulations and practices that shape the information environment in China. “I sort of think of the Great Firewall as something much more like a great sponge. It’s kind of everywhere, and you just have to go through it all the time,” said Sullivan.
But in the context of internet fragmentation, the Great Firewall is a relatively superficial difference between the internet in China and the internet in the U.S. Riccardo Nanni, an adjunct professor at the University of Padua and expert on China’s influence over global internet governance, thinks we may tend to overstress the amount of government control over content in China because their internet remains connected to the global internet — as in, computers in China can communicate with computers outside the country. This means that censorship can be circumvented through technologies like virtual private networks, or VPNs.
In fact, Nanni thinks that the Chinese government strategically allows for some gray areas in the application of censorship rules that enable companies to access certain content and services that would otherwise be blocked. This regulatory ambiguity “has to exist if censorship and economic growth are to cohabitate,” said Nanni.
Censorship in China is an evolving push and pull between economic and political interests. Gianluigi Negro, an associate professor at the University of Siena focused on Chinese media history and internet governance, highlighted the eventual crackdown on the Chinese micro-blogging platform Weibo around 2014 as an example of this. Weibo was repeatedly asked to moderate its content, receiving daily notices from the local and central governments about what should be discussed, promoted and censored. According to interviews Negro conducted in 2014, Weibo delayed censorship as long as possible because it saw the economic value in the platform being a place where users could freely express themselves.
But does censorship negatively impact the Chinese economy at the end of the day? Maybe not — one consequence of the Great Firewall was the protectionist effect it had, which allowed Chinese technology companies to blossom in the absence of foreign competition. Google was blocked in 2010, Facebook and Twitter were blocked in 2009, and Amazon was restricted and then exited the market in 2019. An oligopoly of copycat services formed, including Baidu for search, Alibaba for e-commerce and Tencent (owner of WeChat) for instant communication. But these companies didn’t merely copy, they also innovated products that are highly competitive, particularly in the Chinese context.
This protectionism wasn’t merely incidental, argues Negro, it was intentional. “One of the very first goals … of the Chinese internet was just to make money and to let Chinese domestic companies be strong, both in China and abroad,” said Negro.
According to Sullivan, China’s internet ecosystem — shaped by regulatory and Firewall constraints — seems to compel companies to develop first in the domestic market and then attempt to expand internationally. This is different from other growth models: “Normally when you’re a startup, you don’t care where your customers are coming from. You just want the traffic or the money or whatever it is,” said Sullivan.
Companies that incubate in China’s particular regulatory environment might have trouble adapting their product for the global market. For example, Baidu has largely failed to expand its search engine overseas, in part due to its struggle to adapt to foreign contexts. WeChat faced international backlash when users abroad found that they were being censored and surveilled. More recently, despite the fact that TikTok is wildly popular and was built for an international audience — the censored Chinese version of the app is called Douyin — it was banned in the U.S. due to the threat of Chinese content manipulation (and data extraction).
Censorship might also impact innovation in China. Some have theorized that China will have difficulty competing with the U.S. in cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence due to the drag that complying with censorship rules has on productivity and by “narrowing and distorting” the information that trains AI chatbots. But the release of DeepSeek last month challenges these ideas by showing that innovating within constraints is very much possible in China.
The internet was introduced to China during a decade when it was chasing admission to the World Trade Organization in an effort to integrate with and benefit from the global economy. As a result, internet censorship is deeply ingrained in China’s economic development, and it is certainly a dynamic that companies in China are forced to contend with. But China has proven its ability to control the domestic political and information environment while also achieving economic growth. Whether China is able to continue doing so, we just don’t know yet.
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