Question

Choose a social issue or movement to research outside of the United States. You may select from the following: Women's rights in Afghanistan Internet access in China Untouchables in India Children's rights in Africa Describe the issue, including key people and organizations active in addressing the cause. What methods and strategies are these groups, or advocates for them, using to gain civil rights

Answer 1

Internet Access in China

Issue

Around the world, people use the internet to access information, entertainment, and more. We tend to think of the internet as a system that lacks control, and which everyone is able to access. However, this is not the case in China. China follows a strict mechanism of censorship that restricts the internet for Chinese people. This censorship and surveillance affects roughly 700 million users. Many of these have fought in different ways for free access.

Key people and organizations

It is not easy to establish who is fighting against the system, as these people are often hiding from authorities. However, this group often includes hackers, coders, software programmers, political activists, developers and virtual private network (VPN) suppliers.

Methods and strategies

One of the strategies these groups use is that of developing code or other tools to circumvent the government's censorship. Famous examples are Shadowsocks and GoAgent. VPN allows users to tunnel into the Internet via a different country. Therefore, these are popular among users as well.