China has refused to share its Great Firewall software with Pakistan in a major setback for Islamabad’s efforts to clamp down on political dissent, a journalist has claimed.

The claim comes amid an almost weeklong outage of X, formerly Twitter, in Pakistan.

China and Russia have the most powerful firewalls in place to extensively censor the internet available to domestic audiences.

Speaking on a TV show, journalist Azaz Syed said he had received reports that the Pakistan government was trying to obtain the Great Firewall software from China but Beijing refused to share the technology because it feared that the software could be copied by the United States.

“My information says that there were initial talks because Paksitan wanted to use the same firewall,” he said.

Pakistan is already using a web monitoring system it purchased from a Canadian firm in 2018 under Imran Khan government.

In January, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority confirmed to Aaj News that the web monitoring system was undergoing a massive upgrade.

China has successfully controlled internet access using a combination of measures that rely on information technology and legislation. The measures become known as the Great Firewall, though for many the term refers to the technology side.

Experts say China’s Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words.

If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed and if one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall, according to a research paper by Clayton and others.