China shuts out the world with new internet limits
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Most internet users trying to get past China’s Great Firewall search for a cyber tunnel that will take them outside censorship restrictions to the wider web. But Vincent Brussee is looking for a way in, so he can better glimpse what life is like under the Communist Party.
An analyst with the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Brussee frequently scours the Chinese internet for data. His main focus is information that will help him understand China’s burgeoning social credit system. But in the last few years, he’s noticed that his usual sources have become more unreliable and access tougher to gain.
Some government websites fail to load, appearing to block users from specific geographic locations. Other platforms require a Chinese phone number tied to official identification. Files that were available three years ago have started to disappear as Brussee and many like him, including academics and journalists, are finding it increasingly frustrating to penetrate China’s cyber world from the outside.
“It’s making it more difficult to simply understand where China is headed,” Brussee said. “A lot of the work we are doing is digging for little scraps of information.”
One of the most sweeping surveillance states in the world, China has all but closed its borders since the start of the pandemic, accelerating a political turn inward as nationalism is on the rise and foreign ties are treated with suspicion. A harsh zero-COVID policy has contributed to the attrition of foreign residents, particularly after a long and bitter lockdown this spring in Shanghai, China’s largest and most international city.
At the same time, academics and researchers have complained that the digital window into China seems to be constricting too. That compounds a growing concern for China experts locked out of the country amid deteriorating relations with the West. A tightening of internet access means observers will struggle to decipher what internal pressures China’s leader Xi Jinping may be facing and how to keep track of Beijing’s diplomatic, technological and military ambitions.
Comprehensive analysis on whom China’s Great Firewall keeps out is scarce; much of the focus on the country’s internet freedom remains on domestic censorship. But many researchers who have experienced such challenges suspect that their limited access is part of China’s attempt to ward off what it sees as international meddling, and present its own tightly controlled narrative to the outside world.
Several researchers, for example, noted difficulties accessing Xinjiang government data from abroad, likely a response to international criticism on reports of forced labor and human rights abuses against the western region’s Uyghur population. More puzzling to Brussee was when he encountered similar barriers to the government website of Anhui province, a decidedly less controversial part of China.
Brussee said websites have also added guards against data scraping, limiting how much information he can retrieve via automation on public procurement of surveillance systems, policy documents and citizens or businesses affected by the social credit system. Some bot tests known as CAPTCHA require manual input of Chinese characters or idioms, another barrier for those unfamiliar with the language.
China is keen to project an image of power and superiority. But that has been undermined at times by embarrassing revelations, including recent videos of Shanghai residents protesting harsh lockdown restrictions. The posts were quickly wiped from the Chinese web but continued to circulate beyond the Great Firewall, challenging Beijing’s claims that its zero-tolerance COVID policy was better at containing the pandemic than programs in the West.
Comments on China’s internet can also cast an unflattering light. Earlier this year, users on the nation’s Twitter-like Weibo platform drew condemnation for sexist comments welcoming “beautiful” Ukrainian women as war refugees. An anonymous movement that translates extreme and nationalistic posts from Chinese netizens has outraged state commentators who call it an anti-China smear campaign.
In order to squeeze through bottlenecks, Brussee uses a virtual private network, or VPN, which routes an internet user’s web traffic through servers in a different geographic location. Though it’s a commonly used tool for Chinese netizens to circumvent the Great Firewall, Brussee’s aim is to appear to be visiting websites from within China’s borders.
But VPNs aren’t foolproof. Chinese authorities have cracked down, making connections in and out of China slow and erratic. Brussee said he went a month without a VPN last fall, when his main provider inexplicably stopped functioning. After five fruitless calls to the company, he could only wait for service to eventually resume. His last resort would be to use a Chinese company with more reliable servers inside the country, but he said installing Chinese software comes with additional security risks.
“I don’t think the VPN is enough anymore a lot of the time,” said Daria Impiombato, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who uses VPNs to bounce around to different locations when trying to visit Chinese government websites. “You find workarounds, but it takes way longer.”