What China’s Great Firewall Reveals About the Future of AI
The Wall Dancers traces how freedom and state control evolved online — a dynamic that may influence the artificial intelligence race.
On June 1, 1997, Wired magazine ran a story chronicling the early, heady days of the internet in China, a country in rapid transition. Market reforms were generating new wealth, and the Communist Party, eight years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, was projecting renewed global confidence. A month later, Britain handed Hong Kong back to Beijing, ending colonial rule and prompting President Jiang Zemin to declare that China would no longer be “bullied, oppressed and exploited.” At the time, only about 600,000 people in China were online.
Few today would recall the article’s contents, but its title endured: “The Great Firewall of China.” As one of the authors later wrote, the phrase became “a synecdoche for the Chinese party-state itself.”