Comment by supriyo-biswas

> My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls

Various western networking companies already sell such products to authoritarian regimes, such as Nokia[1], Blue Coat Systems[2] and Siemens[3]. China, for reasons that are well documented elsewhere, has always wanted to build it with "their tech", the only thing that's new to me is their export of such tech to Chinese-allied nations.

> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.

This is a very controversial opinion, but the overton window has shifted in this respect and many people often like censorship/DPI when done for "altruistic reasons", and it was sad to see Europeans (presumably) asking for blocking of social media sites since Nepal[4] had done the same, disregarding the second-order effects it would have.

Of course, we live in interesting times, with a major western world power embracing economic policies that prioritize government ownership of industries[5], which is typically closer to communism than anything we've seen in the past :)

[1] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...