Last week, the U.S. government claimed that the Chinese government’s Internet censorship system, colloquially known as the Great Firewall, is a barrier to trade. In its annual National Trade Estimate Report, the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) office stated that “China’s filtering of cross-border Internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers,” a fairly strong statement.The report also notes that the situation “appears to have worsened over the past year” and that eight of the twenty-five highest traffic websites are now blocked in China. Another six are websites owned by Chinese companies, which speaks to the size of the Chinese Internet. And, as most of those, such as Baidu, Sina Weibo, and Tencent QQ, are direct competitors of the blocked U.S. sites, it also demonstrates the effectiveness of China’s censorship system in creating an ecosystem that allows Chinese tech companies to flourish.
http://blogs.cfr.org/cyber/2016/04/13/banging-your-head-against-a-wall-china-shrugs-at-u-s-criticism-of-censorship/