China’s biggest cellphone company censors content — even in the United States

According to several interviews with frequent Chinese travelers to the United States, those with China Mobile as their carrier are often unable to access American websites and apps that are banned in China. The experience of using China Mobile roaming in the United States “is exactly the same as when you surf on the Internet at home,” said May Sun, a 34-year-old analyst living in Shanghai. “You still don’t have access to what is blocked by the Great Firewall.” According to Samm Sacks, an expert on China’s technology, Beijing wants to “write the rules for global cyber governance.” Beijing’s cyber-governance plans, Sacks writes, are to address cybersecurity challenges, support domestic technologies and, ominously, “expand Beijing’s power to surveil and control the dissemination of economic, social, and political information online.” 

Chinese influence in the United States is quite different from Russia’s — it’s far more difficult to quantify, more sophisticated and more pernicious. The Chinese threat is that Americans will slowly grow accustomed to living in China’s world, where censorship and constraints on freedom of expression are acceptable norms.

[Isaac Stone Fish is an international affairs journalist, a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund]