China trying to shut down VPNs gives the Internet a death blow
I LIVE in the only country in the world where the Internet gets worse every year - at least if you’re trying to look at YouTube or Twitter or Google or virtually any other large non- Chinese site. For years, the only way to get to such services has been with a virtual private network ( VPN), a tool that slips past China’s “Great Firewall” into the freedom of the outside world. Even as the Chinese Internet has gotten better, access to the outside has gotten worse. And now it might be cut off entirely, as orders from the government reportedly seek to shut down VPNs altogether, severing even this thin lifeline.
These increased measures aren’t about control of information. They’re about preventing mobilisation - about stopping angry Chinese from using the methods practised at Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Maidan in Ukraine. Match that with an ever more sprawling security state and growing topdown xenophobia, and measures that would have seemed implausibly harsh four years ago now seem highly likely. But these paranoid demands could end up hamstringing the country’s economic and technological ambitions, leaving it stuck in a pit of its own making.
In the 2000s, even foreign users could get by without a VPN in China; the vast majority of sites weren’t blocked, and there were online anonymisers to let you reach the few that were. (One user board for Tsinghua University students was deliberately hosted on a blocked service, with a notice that read, “If you’re not smart enough to get here, you don’t deserve to be here.”)
Today, it’s almost impossible to use the non- Chinese Internet without a VPN. Eight out of the world’s 25 most popular sites are blocked, and several of those, such as Google and Facebook, are now deeply woven into the fabric of other sites.
That’s why an estimated 90 million people in China now use VPNs, mostly not out of any political impulse but for simple practical reasons like doing business overseas or access to better search engines.
But, practically speaking, China has already found the perfect level of control. Businesses, technicians, scientists, and others who need to connect with the outside world have access - with enough slowdowns and shutdowns to remind them who is in charge. Ordinary people are shut off, but the Chinese Internet itself is sufficiently large, entertaining, and useful for most people, despite it being completely under the thumb of Beijing. The flourishing, critical online world of 2011 has been neutered, with its most vocal advocates jailed or silenced.
Yet the shockwave of paranoia triggered by the Arab Spring and the Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine still resonates inside the Chinese system six years on. There’s no doubt Chinese officials have been reading, and studying, the methods used in the “networked protests” there and in other increasingly autocratic states like Turkey. The key to these protests has been twofold: Widespread social networks and easy mobile access to them. This is what China is setting out to target, not only by shutting down VPNs but by increasing control and monitoring of domestic social media.
Even as it looks to target potential protestors, though, the government is set to do collateral damage to other users of VPNs - the business, scientific, and technological elites whom the country’s future ambitions depend upon. They don’t want to bring down the ruling Communist Party or protest outside Zhongnanhai - they just want to use their Gmail accounts.
A complete shutdown of VPNs would be a genuine disaster. Firms would be unable to reach clients, academics cut off from recent literature, advertisers unable to use any social media but Chinese domestic sites. China’s tech sector would crash overnight, with vital tools and resources cut off. — WPBloomberg