Dr. Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), stated that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) censorship and surveillance pose a threat to "internet freedom" globally. Cooper shared his statement during a July 23 hearing held by the House Select Committee on the CCP titled "The Great Firewall and the CCP’s Export of its Techno-Authoritarian Surveillance State."
"As this Committee has highlighted, the Chinese Communist Party has developed and implemented the most sophisticated censorship and surveillance apparatus in the world," said Cooper. "What has happened in the last few years, however, is not a simple evolution in the Party's tools and techniques. Rather, it is a whole new threat to internet freedom. The first layer of tools, commonly known as the ‘Great Firewall,' form the Communist Party's technical censorship apparatus."
According to Stanford University, the "great firewall of China" is an initiative of the Chinese government, managed by the Ministry of Public Security division with a goal to "monitor and censor" online information. The project, formally called the "Golden Shield Project," started in 1998 and is continuously being monitored. China’s primary search engine, Baidu, utilizes significant censorship in its search algorithms.
According to Cooper's testimony, China's internet censorship affects international perceptions of the United States. U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns said that the "aggressive…efforts to denigrate America" ultimately "tell a distorted story about American society, American history, American policy." Chinese leaders say they want to stabilize bilateral U.S.-China relations, but their actions in the information space suggest otherwise, according to Cooper.
"The Chinese government has exported censorship and surveillance technologies to over 80 countries worldwide," including African countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, and Nigeria, along with Latin American countries like Venezuela and Ecuador, Cooper said during his testimony. The exporting of censorship serves to expand the CCP's "influence and insulate other autocratic regimes against the desires of their own people."
Cooper recommended that the U.S. government counter CCP surveillance abroad, bring it to light domestically, insulate American society against its effects, and better predict its evolution and spread. He said that while the Open Technology Fund is pursuing a strategy against surveillance, there are limits to curbing CCP information warfare. He also emphasized that Congress needs to support research on Chinese censorship and surveillance.
Cooper is a senior fellow at AEI where he focuses on U.S. strategy in Asia, including bilateral competition dynamics between the U.S. and China. He is also a professor at Princeton University and serves as chair of the board of the Open Technology Fund. Prior to joining AEI, he was a senior fellow at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) for Asian security.
