internet - How solid is the Great (Fire-)Wall?


Andrew Lih of the journalism school at HKU started an interesting discussion on the usage of the "Great Firewall" for China's control of the internet and qualifies this comparison with the Great Wall as "conceptually wrong and misleading".
I wrote him this: "The Great Wall as a metaphor for China's efforts to control the Internet is less wrong and misleading than people might think. The Great Wall, a centre piece of Chinese pride, has not been as successful as the Chinese rulers of those days hoped for. It was an idée fix of the rules class that they could keep the barbarians out by building this wall. In the end the barbarians brought down the Qing dynasty, the ultimate proof it did not work. I have been trying to get some examples of incidents where the Great Wall did work but got fast stuck in Disney-movies. So the problem is the original Great Wall, wrongly perceived to be effective and then transferred to the internet. I agree that the imagine is a powerful one, but to deal with this misunderstanding, that would not be easy."