“Every time there’s a major political event there’s a lot of pronouncements - some of which do get enforced, at least leading up to the event, and others which are more statement than action.” Read More: The Other Side of the Great FirewallĬrackdowns on VPNs “come up periodically and usually generates a certain amount of hysteria, and not all under-deservedly, because you can’t totally afford to ignore it,” says Mark Natkin, founder of Beijing-based IT research firm Marbridge Consulting. In addition, companies can have legitimate VPNs registered with the Chinese authorities in order to have secure communications between regional offices.
Unregistered VPNs are officially forbidden, though almost a third of the China’s 650 million Internet users are estimated to have them.
VPNs provide access to this contraband by pretending the user is situated outside the country, and in China are particularly used by foreign nationals including those visiting on business, academics and students trying to access research material not properly indexed by Chinese search engines, and a proportion of Chinese unsatisfied with the sanitized news provided by the nation’s state media.
Foreign news websites such as the New York Times, Bloomberg and, indeed, TIME are deemed verboten, as are uncensored social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Crackdowns on accessing the Internet beyond the Great Firewall - the world’s most sophisticated state-censorship apparatus, employing at least 2 million online censors - are a perennial irritation in China, and highlight how the world’s second largest economy is struggling to balance authoritarianism with its mercantile aspirations.
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