The great firewall of China came because China wanted to police US social media operating in China but weren't able to. That it acted as a major enabler for China's own social media boom is (at least initially) an unintended side-effect.
Have you ever thought that maybe China shouldn't banned all foreign social media and messaging services in the first place? They literally divided the world by putting up a wall between themselves and the rest of the globe, the Great Firewall. Besides, the divide between China and the rest of the world has already happened on the ideological level.
I'm the last person to be an apologist for the Great Firewall, but how does it preclude the OP's point? The Chinese-language web and Chinese Internet users represent a pretty sizeable chuck, to the point that it's self-sustainable and innovation definitely occurs within this space. The Great Firewall just results in a walled garden; access to Facebook isn't going to magically spur innovation!
(Don't get me wrong: The Great Firewall is not a good thing, but I don't see it being wholly relevant here.)
A thought that occurred to me recently, is that the main purpose of China's "Great Firewall" isn't so much silencing dissent[0], as it is protectionism.
By making it effectively impossible for foreign (i.e. American) internet companies to operate in China, they've ensured that the spaces occupied by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Uber, and even to some extent Microsoft have been filled by Chinese-owned and China-based companies.
The very existence of a great firewall is the hallmark of the failure in their state apparatus to manufacture consent. But of course you can openly talk about Chinese spying on Chinese social media because that much is already rendered irrelevant to the mainstream voice so it's no longer a threat to the state that needs to be contained.
The "Great Firewall" in China has over 600 million active Internet users. That's double the population of the United States. Baidu is the dominating search engine, there are replacement services for Twitter, Facebook, and others. Their IM "Wechat" has over 300 million active users alone.
In all reality, Google, Facebook, and others would _love_ to have even the smallest presence in China to get access to that user base. It's a gold mine just waiting to be cracked. Until they are, it will be referred to as "The Great Firewall", when in reality, Chinese internet users probably aren't really missing a lot, outside of politically charged sites, perhaps.
The Great Firewall is about blocking Chinese citizens from accessing content the party doesn’t find palatable. Being a good neighbor to the rest of the world is out of scope for that project.
Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I'm mistaken.
And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.
b/c you're kinda missing the point of the firewall
First all 99% of the Chinese internet content is hosted domestically - so unless a Chinese person is fluent in english it's harder to access foreign information, and they have their own cat videos anyways
The goal really is to have no institutions that rival the government for organizing people and disseminating information. You can always get around the firewall, and news sites are actually accessible - even sometimes facebook will work from China. The system isn't perfect, but the authorities are happy if at the end of the day people don't have twitter/facebook/G+ accounts, they don't visit foreign sites regularly b/c they've been made unreliable, and they end up in domestic forums where things can be monitored and contained.
When authorities see the Arab Spring Twitter revolution they're probably thinking "yeaaahhh... that's exactly what we want to avoid. No foreign social media please"
I'd assumed up to this point that the "Great Firewall" of China was primarily intended to censor and control China's own population. Now I'm thinking it's main purpose was as a strategic defense initiative. Now they can attack more freely without fearing for their own infrastructure.
Firewalls don’t only block traffic, they throttle it, log it, and shape it. The US/Facebook firewall is further up the stack than China’s and is more stealthy so rarely blocks any content.
Unfortunately, it's not economic loss, it's economic gain. By building the great firewall, China kept out Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., and thus enabled some huge companies to come into existence that likely otherwise wouldn't have, e.g., Baidu, Tencent, etc. I'm surprised more countries aren't doing this in order to enable their own IT worlds to come into existence.
I dont know, I really fear a world where the US blocks all chinese social media, and china blocks all US social media, in the name of 'national security'.
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