Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Should China Suspend Spending on Great Firewall (GFW)?


With help from US companies (Cisco, for example), the security ministry of China developed the most sophisticated and technical successful Great Firewall (GFW) project to block Chinese Netizens from obtaining and spreading information from the Net. Sites such as Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Picasa, Blogger are blocked, along with others.

In the past 10 years, a conservative estimate of the cost of the project is around $20B RMB ($6.5B). If considering the majority of Chinese people online didn't care about the outside world, then the cost on individual Netizen is an astonishing $30,769 RMB ($5,000) per capital.

If you are one of the Chinese who flipped the 'wall' to read this article, you should feel satisfied after knowing that the government had spent $5,000 on you.

The study was done by Li Huafang.

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