The Lock Net: How China Silently Rewrites Internet Rules

Poonam Sharma
With a hyperconnected world, where the internet is viewed as a wild and borderless frontier, China has succeeded in creating a paradoxical system—a global yet deeply national internet, porous yet closed, fast-changing yet strictly controlled. This is the central argument of The Lock Net: How China Controls Its Internet and Why It Matters, a pioneering report coauthored by Jessica Batke, a veteran China policy analyst, and Laura Adelson, assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and cybersecurity expert.

Together, Batke and Adelson explain the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s subtle, multifaceted system for controlling information. China’s digital censorship and online management is more than a “Great Firewall,” they write—a “lock net” that is an evolving, flexible system aimed not just at blocking information, but shaping, cleansing, and manipulating the very data flow in and out of its borders.

From Language Curiosity to Cyberspace Surveillance

Jessica Batke’s entry into China studies was rooted in linguistic curiosity. Having been challenged by Chinese as an undergraduate, she ended up in China for her senior year and never left. Adelson took the backdoor of cybersecurity to enter China’s internet architecture after years of researching threats on social media platforms. She soon realized that a comprehensive understanding of digital security could not be feasible without arriving at how national states, China foremost, shape online systems for power and control.

Their report is a result of this cross-over—Chinese politics and electronic infrastructure—and it couldn’t come at a more appropriate time.

The Red Note Incident: A Microcosm of Macro-Control

Perhaps most indicative of the times is the sudden surge of American users on Red Note, a Chinese social media app like Instagram. In January 2025, well over half a million Americans downloaded the app in defiance of a proposed ban on TikTok in the U.S., ironically seeking to circumvent their own government’s authority by entering China’s online community.

First, the test was full of sincere cultural exchange and lighthearted trolling. But then, in the familiar Chinese Communist Party style, things escalated. Red Note was told to segregate foreign and Chinese users, likely through algorithmic separation of content—building walled gardens within the app. Though the firm would not comment to Batke and Adelson, user accounts and behavior changes indicated a coordinated intervention.

This event, according to Adelson, sums up the “clash of user expectations.” In America, online platforms are a means of protest—even against one’s own government. In China, such a possibility is not merely inconceivable—it’s prohibited. This, the researchers contend, is not a one-time event but symptomatic of a larger systemic framework.

The Lock Net: A Three-Tiered System of Control

The central structure of the report divides China’s internet management into three layers, which overlap one another:

Network-Level Controls

At the most fundamental level, the internet is physical—fiber-optic cables, data centers, APIs. In China, every component of this infrastructure requires government approval. This means that control is built into the pipes, so to speak. If a company wants to lay cables or operate servers, it must comply with the Party’s regulations. This gives the state direct influence over the architecture itself.

Service-Level Controls

All platforms that are based in China—both foreign and domestic—have to comply with national legislation. These range from laws requiring access to data and collaborating with state-level surveillance to censorship regulations which platforms are required to implement proactively. This leaves companies torn between having to expand and profit without breaking political red lines.

Legal and Enforcement Mechanisms

Chinese citizens are under tight laws that make certain speech a criminal act. “You can’t say certain things,” Batke emphasizes. “That’s not abstract. That means you get invited to tea.” (A euphemism for being called in by state security.)

These tiers support each other, producing a robust and dynamic feedback loop. In contrast to the “Great Firewall” metaphor, suggesting a rigid barrier, the “lock net” is closer to a water-lock system—regulating flows of information according to political currents.

Memory-Holing with PowerPoint

The most unsettling aspect of the report is how companies indoctrinate their censorship workers. At one of China’s biggest search engines (whose name is withheld by the report), workers are said to be shown PowerPoint slides of forbidden subjects—like the forbidden religious organization “Eastern Lightning”—telling them to commit the names to memory long enough to remove them from the web. The slides then vanish. Workers have to know what not to know.

This uncomfortable tension—teaching workers to remove subjects they are not permitted to keep—demonstrates the bizarre richness of hidden censorship. It also illustrates the ironic problem of enlisting AI to automate censorship. Machines do not “forget,” and AI networks could accidentally reveal the very information the Party wishes to keep hidden.

Algorithms, Propaganda, and the Positive Information Gap

Chinese censorship is not merely subtractive—it’s additive as well. The CCP doesn’t merely delete information, it replaces the vacuum with positive information. These are both formal state propaganda and user-generated content reflecting Party values.

Algorithmically, this is all the more powerful. Because, as Adelson describes, social media sites reward content that engenders engagement. If the Party can make its preferred stories more engaging—or even just more apparent—than less desirable ones, then it can shape discourse subtly but at scale.

This is also censorship’s enemy: because it makes censorship more difficult to identify. If a Tiananmen Square post doesn’t appear in your feed, was it taken down—or merely never suggested? That lack of clarity is not a bug, but a feature.

Zones of Silence and Innovation

Cleverly, however, censorship in China is geographical. Xinjiang or ethnic Tibetan regions, for example, experience tighter controls. Yet investigators were amazed to discover that provinces such as Ningxia, which are relatively low-risk, have their own provincial firewalls, blocking not two but ten times more websites than the national average.

These censorship microclimates coexist with innovation zones, in which technology corporations are allowed to experiment and expand. The CCP navigates a line between suppressing speech and fostering economic development. This dichotomy was evident in 2013, when China briefly blocked GitHub, then changed course after criticism from its own tech industry.

Adelson stresses that the Party is ready to take economic losses if it guarantees political dominance—but it will also happily encourage innovation where it does not destabilize the regime. “The state always comes first,” she explains. “But then, after that, it’s happy to let workers code and build.”

 Why the Lock Net Matters

The Lock Net is more than a report on China. It’s an alarm call to the world.

At a moment when authoritarian digital rule is on the ascent—and liberal democracies grapple with their own content moderation challenges—China’s system of coercive, dynamic, and data-intensive control presents a compelling alternative. Not a preferable one, maybe, but an increasingly dominant one.

As Chinese sites expand globally and Western sites increasingly encounter encroaching regulation, the struggle for the future of the internet might ultimately hinge not merely on freedom of expression—but on whose infrastructure, whose algorithms, and whose concepts of truth and memory.

In China, the solution is obvious. In the rest of the world, it is still being typed.