This piece was written by a Yale student for The Future of U.S.–China Relations, a joint special issue by The Yale Politic and Tsinghua Youth Voice.
“Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.”
The auditorium burst into laughter. It was March 8, 2000, and Bill Clinton stood on stage before hundreds of diplomats, delegates, and trade ministers at Johns Hopkins. He was placing a bet that the internet would do what decades of diplomacy couldn’t: it would liberate China.
That same morning, Clinton had submitted legislation granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations. This piece of legislation was China’s final step toward WTO membership. The world’s largest market was about to open, bringing the world’s largest authoritarian state online.
But Clinton wasn’t guessing. He had history on his side.
Nine years earlier, Gorbachev had resigned on Christmas Day, and the Soviet flag was hauled down from the Kremlin for the last time. Francis Fukuyama was one of the first to declare victory. In The End of History and the Last Man, he argued that liberal democracy had prevailed not by force but by attraction: it was the final form of human government. Humanity had reached, as Fukuyama wrote, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” History was over.
The invention of the Internet seemed to prove him right. Authoritarian regimes survived on information control. But the internet had no center to seize, no headquarters to raid, no leader to execute; block one path, and information would find another. The network was built to survive nuclear war. It would survive dictators. In 1996, John Perry Barlow, former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, spoke for a generation. Taking the stage at the World Economic Forum, he addressed the governments of the world: “You weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” It was with the same conviction that Clinton spoke four years later. “When over 100 million people in China can get on the Net,” he told the auditorium, “it will be impossible to maintain a closed political and economic society.” Most of the audience was still laughing.
More than twenty-five years later, the laughter has been silenced.
In Myanmar, Facebook connected 20 million people to the internet for the first time: and then the military used it to coordinate genocide against the Rohingya. Target lists and photos of mutilated victims circulated in private group chats, with UN investigators describing Facebook as “a beast”. In Bahrain, protestors uploaded photos and videos of their defiance. They didn’t know they were filming their own arrests. In China, the government didn’t just survive the internet; they rewired it to build the most sophisticated surveillance state in history for the world to see. Sixteen years later, Foreign Policy delivered the punchline Clinton didn’t see coming, with an article headlined: “The Man Who Nailed Jello to the Wall.” China had built the Great Firewall, visible to the whole world, but impossible to see past from within. But while Washington was watching Beijing, something was changing at home.
In 2016, a man drove six hours to a Washington pizzeria carrying an AR-15, convinced by posts he’d seen that Hillary Clinton ran a child trafficking ring from the basement. The restaurant had no basement. By 2019, according to the CDC, suicide had become the second leading cause of death for Americans under twenty-five. In January 2021, rioters stormed the Capitol, many of them organized through Facebook groups that, according to internal documents later leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the platform’s own algorithm had recommended. For the last decade, Washington asked how China built its wall. No one thought to ask what America had built instead.
Josh Chan showed me his phone in a Beijing café. Two browsers: one for China’s internet, one for everything beyond the wall. He toggled between them with the ease of someone switching languages, the muscle memory of navigating a world that had been deliberately divided. He knew he was inside a system. The political theorist Langdon Winner once asked whether artifacts have politics: whether design itself is a decision about power. Josh was living the answer.
Americans looked at the internet and saw a finished product, open by nature, impossible to reshape. They forgot that openness was a choice embedded in architecture. They forgot to ask who makes the choices. China did not forget. Where Americans saw inevitability, China saw a system designed to spread information freely, waiting to be rewired. In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched the Golden Shield— not a firewall to keep the internet out, but a system to rebuild it from within. Where the original architecture routed around blockages, China engineered chokepoints. Where data flowed freely, China built gates. Within a decade, the Golden Shield wasn’t imposed on the internet. In China, it was the internet.
Kyle Chan, a researcher at Brookings who studies Chinese technology policy, described what emerged. “WeChat is technically a private company,” he said, “but it functions like infrastructure, and it has that government interface.” The numbers tell the story: 1.3 billion users, one billion transactions per day. During COVID, the government deployed a Health Code through WeChat. Green meant subways, malls, and work. Red meant quarantine. The platform became the key to movement itself.
Chris, a young developer from Beijing building augmented reality experiences for museums and landmarks, explained the logic from inside. “Technology is freedom,” he told me. “Content is restriction.” The distinction was clean. Build whatever you want, innovate however you can— the government manages what gets shown. “They know nothing about the content,” Chris said. “They just approve the content. Is it okay to make public?” If yes, proceed. If no, adjust.
Josh pulled up his WeChat to show me. “I can pay for anything with my phone,” he said. “Food, rent, train tickets, utilities. It’s all here.” The app knew where he went, what he bought, who he talked to. He knew this. Everyone knew this. “Is it a trade-off?” he said. “Maybe. But it’s not like I sit around every day thinking about what I’m giving up.”
This system did not arrive fully formed. Susan Shirk, who directs the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego, recalled a different era. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, investigative journalism flourished. Newspapers had to attract readers; they published what people wanted to read. Citizen journalism spread on Weibo. “The media served as a kind of fire alarm,” Shirk said, “to alert the central authorities to the behavior of local officials.” If you don’t have elections, how do you monitor corruption? A more open media system helped. The central leadership found it useful to hear complaints.
Then the calibration ended. In 2008, as the Beijing Olympics approached, restrictions tightened. Shirk watched it happen. “I thought it was going to be temporary,” she said, “just something you did before this major event, the Olympics.” She paused. “But then it never loosened up.”
Under Xi Jinping, the tightening became strategy. New guidelines established that any post forwarded five hundred times could mean three years in prison. Within weeks, hundreds were arrested. In 2016, Ren Zhiqiang, a real estate tycoon with thirty-seven million Weibo followers, criticized Xi online. His account vanished. He is now serving eighteen years.
Josh told me about his parents. His father survived the Cultural Revolution. His mother remembered when the state assigned your job, your apartment, your spouse. “They lived through chaos,” Josh said. “They don’t want it back. Neither do I.”
Shirk put it differently when I asked whether people accepted the restrictions. “Many people are frustrated by the limitation on access to information,” she said. “It’s what they have to live with. So they probably don’t spend every day wringing their hands about it.” She paused. “Sort of. What’s the point?”
“It’s not just surveillance,” Josh said when I pressed him. “When people complained about the milk powder scandal, officials got fired. The government listens. Not to everything, but to enough.” The bargain, however unequal, was legible. The rules were posted. The punishments were public. And sometimes the complaints were heard.
Chris explained how you learn to operate inside. “You don’t step on the red line,” he said. “You follow the rule.” He paused. “And you create your antenna.”
The antenna is a feeling for where the boundaries are. Everyone develops it. You learn which topics to avoid, which words trigger filters, which jokes are safe and which will get a post deleted. The knowledge is embodied, instinctive, passed down through experience. You don’t need to read the guidelines. You feel for them.
This is why resistance has vocabulary. When a post disappears, users comment that it has been “harmonized”— a bitter joke inverting the government’s rhetoric of social harmony. The censorship is visible, so the mockery is too. In November 2022, a fire in Ürümqi killed ten people locked inside a building sealed for COVID quarantine. On the steps of Nanjing’s Communication University, a student held up a blank sheet of paper. Police snatched it from her hands. Within hours, hundreds gathered on the same steps, each holding their own blank sheets. In Shanghai, crowds filled Ürümqi Middle Road, named for the city of the fire. Silently, they held their white paper.
The antenna, working at scale. Everyone knew what the blank sheet meant. Everyone knew the name that should have been written on it. When everyone knows what is forbidden, silence becomes a language. The power of the white paper came from its emptiness— because no one needed to write anything down. That night, the police removed the street sign. By then, the silence had already spread.
“In China, it’s top-down control, yes,” Kyle Chan said when I asked him to compare the systems. “But at least it’s all united. In the US, every social media platform is its own feudal lord.”
Frustration requires something to push against. You can resent a wall you can see. You can mock it, navigate it, and develop an antenna for its edges. You can hold up a blank sheet of paper, and everyone understands. China built visible control. The wall has a name. The bargain is legible. The question is: what happens when the walls have no name, and the users don’t know they’re trapped inside them?
Winner’s lesson was simple: technology is not neutral, and design is always a decision about power. But Americans looked at the internet and saw something that transcended politics entirely: something clean, rational, inevitable, a dream too elegant to question. In Menlo Park, Facebook hung a poster: “Move Fast and Break Things.” No one thought to ask who was building the architecture, or what would happen when the builders needed to get paid.
Justin Rosenstein was twenty-three when he helped build something he believed would make the world kinder. In 2007, working as an engineer at Facebook, he co-invented the Like button. “The main intention I had,” he said later, “was to make positivity the path of least resistance.” A thumbs-up instead of silence. Approval without awkwardness. The small warmth of being seen. He never imagined what it would become.
For a brief window, the dream held. Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil.” Your data improved the product; the more you searched, the better the search function became. Facebook connected old friends, college classmates, and distant family. The technology served its users. Then the money ran out. Two years after Clinton cracked his jello joke, the NASDAQ had lost 78 percent of its value. Pets.com collapsed. Webvan collapsed. eToys collapsed. The companies that survived were the ones that found a new product to sell.
The product was you.
The pivot is datable. In 2003, three Google engineers filed a patent titled “Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising.” No press conference, no debate. Just a filing. In 2008, Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg from Google’s advertising division to build the same machine. The technology hadn’t changed. Its purpose had. And the redesign was silent.
Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School who has spent three decades studying how technology reshapes organizations, named what had emerged in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. “Users are not customers,” she wrote. “We are the sources of raw-material supply.”
Rosenstein’s Like button showed how it worked. What he had designed for warmth became a metric— validation quantified, approval made countable, self-worth tied to a number that refreshed with every scroll. “I never intended for it to become a source of validation-seeking,” he said. But intention was irrelevant. The button did what the system needed it to do.
Aza Raskin was solving what seemed like a simple problem. Pagination was clunky; clicking “next page” created friction. His solution was infinite scroll: no bottom of the page, no natural pause, just the endless descent. He didn’t call it addiction at the time. He called it smooth design. “Behind every screen on your phone,” Raskin said later, “there are generally like a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.” He looked at what he had built and called it “behavioral cocaine sprinkled all over your interface.” He called infinite scroll one of his biggest regrets.
Notification badges borrowed from slot machines: variable rewards, unpredictable timing, the red dot that could not be ignored. Pull-to-refresh mimicked the lever. Rosenstein wanted positivity. Raskin wanted smooth design. Every feature solved a problem. Every solution became a trap.
Chamath Palihapitiya was watching. As Facebook’s Vice President of Growth, he sat in the meetings where the metrics were reviewed, the experiments approved, the targets set. He saw what happened when Rosenstein’s Like button met Raskin’s infinite scroll, when warmth became data and smooth design became compulsion. Years later, at Stanford, he admitted what he had known all along:
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.”
Then he said the harder thing: “I think we all knew in the back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole line of, ‘there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences’. I think in the back of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen.”
They knew. They built it anyway.
In 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users without telling them. Researchers manipulated News Feeds to show more positive or negative content, then measured what users posted afterward. The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: emotional states could be transferred at scale. The platform could make you sadder. It could make you angrier. You would never know it was happening. The experiment proved what Palihapitiya had sensed in those meetings. The system worked.
In 2018, Cambridge Analytica harvested 87 million Facebook profiles to build psychographic models for targeting voters in Brexit and the American presidential election. Users were not told. The platforms learned to read them— when they hesitated, what they almost clicked, how long they lingered on a photograph before scrolling past. According to a 2013 study, Facebook likes alone could predict sexual orientation with 88 percent accuracy and political affiliation with 85 percent. The asymmetry was total. The platforms knew their users better than those users knew themselves.
Frances Haugen saw the data from inside. She spent two years as a data scientist at Facebook, watching the numbers, reading the internal research, understanding what the algorithm had learned. In October 2021, she sat before the Senate Commerce Committee with tens of thousands of pages she had printed after hours and carried out in a bag.
“Almost no one outside of Facebook,” she told the senators, “knows what happens inside of Facebook. The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government, and from governments around the world.”
The documents she leaked showed what the company knew and did not say. Internal slides reported that 13.5 percent of teen girls said Instagram made thoughts of suicide worse. Other slides showed how the algorithm fed on attention: a girl who searched for diet tips would be shown thinner bodies, then fasting routines, then pro-anorexia forums. Each recommendation was a choice the algorithm made, optimized for time on the platform. The content that kept her scrolling was the content that made her sick.
Raskin’s infinite scroll delivered it. Rosenstein’s Like button measured her engagement with it. The system they built, the system Palihapitiya scaled, was working exactly as designed.
Palihapitiya has children. When asked about their relationship to the platform he built, he was blunt: “I don’t use this shit. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit.”
The man who scaled the growth engine will not let his children near it. Somewhere, a girl is still scrolling.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen testified. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests.”
The language softens the machinery. Personalization. Engagement. Digital exhaust. Terms of service stretch to 12,000 words, nearly three times the length of the United States Constitution, written in prose designed to be scrolled past, not read. The feed asks for nothing visible: free search, free email, free maps and music and video, memories surfaced without prompting, the world encyclopedized in your pocket. No fees. No friction. No visible cost. Americans made a bargain without knowing there was one.
Zuboff calls this instrumentarian power. It does not tell you what you cannot say— that would be authoritarianism, legible and resistible. Instrumentarianism shapes what you want, what you see, what you believe, without ever issuing an order. You remain free to speak. The architecture determines who hears.
No one stopped it. In 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: twenty-six words that allowed platforms to host content without liability. The law was designed to let the internet grow, and it worked. America had regulated railroads, telephones, broadcasting. Not this. When the business model shifted, no new law followed. The architecture became the rules. No one voted on the terms.
There is an objection. Susan Shirk raised it when I asked her about invisible control: “Invisible control by whom? So long as we have a pluralistic system, and it’s not the government doing it itself… Just read more different things. You have free choice.”
The objection deserves an answer. In China, the state decides what citizens cannot see. The control has a face. In America, no one decides— and that is precisely the problem. There is no commissar, no directive, no committee. The algorithm optimizes for engagement because engagement sells ads. Engagement rewards outrage because outrage holds attention. No one planned the outcome. The outcome emerged. And emergence is harder to fight than intention, because there is no one to petition, no office to confront, no blank sheet of paper that could name what is happening.
Rosenstein saw the fracture from the other side. In The Social Dilemma, he described what the algorithm had created: “You look over at the other side, and you start to think, ‘How can those people be so stupid? Look at all of this information that I’m constantly seeing. How are they not seeing that same information?'”
He paused. “And the answer is: they’re not seeing that same information.”
According to Pew Research, 80 percent of Americans now believe that Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on basic facts. Not values. Not policies. Facts. The algorithm sorted Americans into separate worlds, each feed tuned to outrage, each showing the other side at its most contemptible. Rosenstein had wanted to make positivity the path of least resistance. Instead, he helped build a machine that made contempt the path of least resistance, and the paths diverged until no one could see across them.
“Harmonized” is a Chinese word for censorship. It is bitter, ironic, shared among everyone who uses it. When a post vanishes in Beijing, people know why. The censorship is visible, so the vocabulary exists. What is the American word for when the algorithm buries a post without telling you? When your reality is shaped by systems you cannot see, according to rules you never agreed to, for purposes that are not your own? There is no word. The condition has no name.
China built visible control: the rules posted, the wall named, the bargain legible, however brutal. You can resent a wall you can see. You can mock it, navigate it, hold up a blank sheet of paper, and everyone understands what you mean. America built something else: not a wall but a mirror, each feed reflecting what the algorithm calculated its user would engage with, each reflection feeling like the world itself. No wall to climb. No censor to name. Just the scroll, endless and personalized, and no reason to suspect that anything lay beyond it.
Both are failures of self-governance. One by design. One by emergence. Rosenstein wanted warmth. Raskin wanted smooth design. Palihapitiya wanted growth. Haugen watched from inside until she couldn’t anymore. No one wanted what emerged. It emerged anyway.
But invisibility is not permanence. Haugen printed the internal research, page by page, and made it physical. She carried it out and sat before Congress and named what she had seen. For a moment, the mirror showed its frame.
Clinton stood in that auditorium in 2000 and bet on information. He believed the free flow of data would liberate China. He was wrong. But he was wrong about America, too. He never imagined what would happen when information became the product— when the system that shaped what Americans saw had every reason to stay unseen.
Forty years ago, Langdon Winner asked the question: What values are embedded in this architecture? Who built it, and why? In Beijing, the wall has a name. Josh toggles between two browsers because he knows there is something on the other side. In America, we are still learning that there is a wall at all.