ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the Great Firewall of China grows metaphorical as a virtual border, the increasingly sophisticated approach of the system to surveillance and censorship, the outsourcing of surveillance and censorship to Internet businesses and private groups and hence the making fractal of this virtual border, and the everyday confrontations that inversely besiege the Great Firewall. The Great Wall of China, which offers the metaphor to the most aggressive system of Internet control in the world, the Great Firewall of China, may also prefigure its future pass. In the shadow of the Great Firewall, contra-engineering is sprouting up, devoted to evading blocks and monitors. Libertarian hackers and software engineers, enterprising students, outlawed religious sects and exiled dissident groups all strive to launch new download tools that outsmart the censors. Media censorship and Internet blackouts effectively dislocate public grievance and reduce it to scattered groans and cries.
