| Abstract [eng] |
This master’s thesis analyzes China’s Great Firewall not only as a technological mechanism for controlling the internet in China, but also as a culturally significant boundary of security and identity. The problem raised in this paper stems from the tension between the conventional interpretation of the Great Firewall as an infrastructure for censorship, filtering, and access restriction, and its significance in China’s official discourse as a means of protecting the national information space, ensuring digital sovereignty, and maintaining social order. The aim of the study is to reveal how this tension shapes the symbolic significance of the Great Firewall in China’s cyberspace; therefore, the theoretical part of the work discusses the concepts of the state, sovereignty, borders, concepts of the Chinese political-philosophical order, cyber sovereignty, digital nationalism, and identity construction. The study employs a qualitative interpretive approach. Critical discourse analysis is used to analyze China’s official discourse on internet governance, while semiotic analysis is applied to examine users’ symbolic practices. The empirical data consists of official Chinese texts on cyber security and digital development, as well as publicly available examples of user expression: memes, coded language, homophones, visual substitutes, and forms of censorship circumvention. The study shows that, in official discourse, the Great Firewall is framed as a barrier that safeguards state sovereignty, information order, and cultural security. In user practices, this boundary is not accepted unambiguously, it is circumvented and transformed, or in some cases upheld within nationalist narratives. Therefore, the Great Firewall functions as a multi-layered symbolic mechanism that combines technological control, political legitimization, cultural memory, the boundaries of public discourse, and forms of belonging to China’s digital space. |
