Surveillance States and Information Control

China operates the world's most extensive internet filtering apparatus, commonly called the Great Firewall, formally rooted in the Golden Shield Project initiated by the Ministry of Public Security around 1998 and expanded through the 2000s. It blocks or heavily restricts access to major foreign platforms, including Google, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Wikipedia, using techniques such as DNS poisoning, IP address blocking, and deep packet inspection to filter traffic in real time. This filtering infrastructure has developed alongside China's Social Credit System, whose pilot programs, launched from around 2014 onward in various municipalities, aggregate data on individuals' and businesses' behavior to reward or penalize access to services such as loans, travel, and housing.