For nearly 20 years, the so-called Great Firewall of China has limited the ability of mainland Chinese citizens to access the uncensored internet. The laws used to give the government authority to regulate the internet were passed in 1997, and work on what China called the Golden Shield Project began in 2003.
The Great Firewall isn’t just a single, monolithic system. It includes a wide range of tactics and techniques, including IP blocking and DNS / URL filtering, suspected DNS poisoning, search term censorship, both automatic and manual monitoring of social media for certain keywords or protest advocacy, TCP connection monitoring and resets, personal internet history monitoring of at least some individuals, and some additional capabilities on top of that. The Great Firewall has done at least some detection and banning of VPNs for years, but if a new report in the South China Morning Post is accurate, China may be moving to kill that loophole for good.
The report , sourced to “people familiar with the matter,” claims China’s government has told all of its telecommunications carriers to ban all individual access to VPN services. Up to this point, these services have operated in a bit of a legal gray area, at least where corporate usage was concerned, though the government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has pledged to crack down on illicit VPN usage by corporations. At least one service provider, GreenVPN, announced earlier this year that it would cease all operations on July 1 after receiving “a notice from regulatory departments.” It did not comment further on the situation.
The new rules restricting access to VPNs could make it harder for companies to do business in China. While they have the option to lease lines to access the international internet, they must register such service usage with the government, which presumably keeps tabs on it to ensure it remains above-board (by Chinese standards).
Difficulty balancing the demands of the government and its own institutional practices led Google to leave China in 2010. While other companies have continued to operate according to the government’s requirements, these new rules won’t make that any easier, according to Jake Parker, the Beijing-based vice president of the US-China Business Council.
“This seems to impact individuals,” Parker told the South China Morning Post. “[But] VPNs are incredibly important for companies trying to access global services outside of China. In the past, any effort to cut off internal corporate VPNs has been enough to make a company think about closing or reducing operations in China. It’s that big a deal.”
Then again, a number of US companies have managed to find solutions to previous “big deals” where China is concerned, given the size of its markets and rapidly growing economy. If this report is accurate, individuals in China who want access to uncensored international news will soon have even fewer options.
Difficulty balancing the demands of the government and its own institutional practices led Google to leave China in 2010. While other companies have continued to operate according to the government’s requirements, these new rules won’t make that any easier, according to Jake Parker, the Beijing-based vice president of the US-China Business Council.
“This seems to impact individuals,” Parker told the South China Morning Post. “[But] VPNs are incredibly important for companies trying to access global services outside of China. In the past, any effort to cut off internal corporate VPNs has been enough to make a company think about closing or reducing operations in China. It’s that big a deal.”
Then again, a number of US companies have managed to find solutions to previous “big deals” where China is concerned, given the size of its markets and rapidly growing economy. If this report is accurate, individuals in China who want access to uncensored international news will soon have even fewer options.
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