Introduction

Walls are omnipresent in the discourse of digital China. The “Great Firewall” is routinely used as a summary descriptor for the ever-expanding institutional, technical, and ideological infrastructure that enables the Chinese state to monitor and control online spaces. Xi Jinping's discussions of “Internet safety” and “cybersovereignty” are steeped in border security rhetoric, while Chinese netizens can only access “walled” (beiqiang 被牆) content by “going over the wall” (fanqiang 翻牆) – defined by the Baidu Chinese dictionary as “circumventing IP blockers, content filtering, domain hijacking, traffic restrictions, etc., to achieve access to web content.” ¹ Although the Great Wall has played a central role in conceptualising China's relationship with the world throughout the modern period, the current discourse on digital China also continues the longstanding convention of thinking about modern China through metaphors of confinement and restriction that point to shifting understandings of Chinese difference as both a burden and a strength. While Lu Xun famously characterised modern China as trapped in the “iron house” (tie wuzi 鐵屋子) of its own history, the enigmatic “wallfacers” (mianbizhe 面壁者) in Liu Cixin's science fiction epos The Dark Forest (Hei'an senlin 黑暗森林, 2008) represent the last vestiges of independent human thought, as they try to escape the all-seeing intelligence particles of Earth's alien invaders. The “paranoid narratives of total surveillance and total freedom” ² that have characterised the dominant conceptualisation of fibre-optic networks since the 1990s have further cemented the rhetorical allure of the wall as a symbol of the technological and discursive boundaries that separate Chinese netizens from the rest of the world. They have also fostered an analytical approach that views Chinese online spaces primarily through the lens of state control and civic resistance. When it comes to digital China, no topics have probably received more public and academic attention than surveillance and censorship.