In the journal article, “The Political Economy of Governing ISPs in China,” Henry Hu discusses the role that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) play in the CCP’s censorship and filtering capabilities.  These include not only making certain sites and content unavailable to Chinese citizens, but also making it impossible for foreigners to access domestic Chinese content by using the “Great Firewall.”  The government does this in an attempt to keep out content, media, and information that they deem “harmful” to the party.  They believe that they can censor the thoughts of their citizens by only exposing them to approved Chinese content and by keeping out foreign media.  This is similar to what has been done in other communist regimes, such as Russia and North Korea.  The leaders of these countries seem to be convinced that if their citizens get their hands on Western Media, that it will put dangerous ideas in their heads that are against the party, and will ultimately lead to their downfall.  This definitely seems to be what is happening in China, mainly due to the fact that the Great Firewall is run by the central government.  While the creation of censored content in mainly the domain of the local governments of individual cities, the central government is in charge of keeping foreign media out, and prevent foreigners from accessing their media.  This shows a great level of insecurity within the regime, that they seem to believe that just giving their citizens access to youtube will be dangerous to their party.  In some sense I can see where they are coming from.  Social media has become a powerful tool to be used against governments in the past decade. Like in Egypt, the protests and riots were organized using social media, so if this is truly of concern to the CCP then it could be a smart strategy to censor their internet.