China's Great Firewall: VPNs Face Crackdown Amidst Censorship Efforts

Lin recently returned to China after getting her master's degree in Australia and is again using virtual private networks (VPNs) to climb over the "Great Firewall", Beijing's censorship apparatus.

She first used a VPN as a high school student to "stay on top of celebrity news and events" on Instagram.

When Lin returned home last year, she found that the VPN she relied on a decade ago was still up and running, but unstable.

"It's hard to articulate how often the disturbance occurs," said Lin, who asked to use a pseudonym for safety reasons.

"Sometimes, videos on Instagram load really slow."

Lin said the VPN app she used was able to route her connection through different countries. Whenever one route was not working, she switched to a different one to restart the app.

"They have routes like Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore. I don't know exactly what they mean. I just switch when it's not working," she said.

Censorship coincides with anniversary

Billy, a Hong Kong resident who also asked to use a pseudonym, regularly travels to mainland China and for two years used a VPN called LetsVPN.

Billy told the ABC that he found LetsVPN, which is popular with expats in China, after a few other VPNs did not work.

In April, LetsVPN issued a statement saying it "made a difficult decision" to "suspend services in China's mainland area" due to "the impact of continuous internet blockage".

In May, the company resumed "standard operations" but said it could not guarantee service availability in China.

Billy said he had decided to switch VPNs to a new one that still worked.

"It's becoming more difficult finding stable VPNs," he said.

"China recently is very active on banning VPN services."

US-based censorship analyst Eric Liu said there was a new round of crackdowns on VPNs in April.

Mr Liu said telecom carriers in parts of China were asked to comb through their networks and block all VPN services.

At the same time, some netizens in China posted on social media that the VPN services they used were down.

Mr Liu said that often when people experienced difficulties using VPN services it was because the government had just installed new censorship technology.

He said it could also happen during sensitive political events, like national congress weeks in March or occasions like the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

On June 4, 1989, pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, the centre of Beijing, faced a bloody crackdown from the Chinese army.

The estimated death toll ranged from hundreds to thousands of people.

The massacre remains a taboo and references are censored on the internet in China.

The Great Firewall was established two decades ago, when China began systematic efforts to install technologies and implement regulations to keep the country's domestic internet space free from websites and services that the government deemed inappropriate.

Ihsan Yilmaz, a professor from Deakin University who has studied censorship, said China had moved from blocking access to foreign websites to shutting down the methods people used to get around the Great Firewall.

Professor Yilmaz said this included restricting unauthorised VPN services, disrupting VPN connections, removing VPN apps from app stores, and penalising some providers and users.

LetsVPN and the Chinese government have been contacted for comment.

'VPNs are not risk free'

For some people in China VPNs could be a "lifeline", said Professor Yilmaz.

"For people living in authoritarian regimes, VPNs are often much more than a privacy tool," he said.

"They allow people to access independent news, communicate with family or colleagues abroad, use blocked platforms, document abuses, and participate in political or civic life online.

"For journalists, activists, minorities, students, researchers, and ordinary citizens, VPNs may provide one of the few remaining ways to reach the open internet."

Research from the Global Public Policy Institute published this week indicated that years of government crackdowns had made unsanctioned VPNs less readily accessible to average internet users.

State-approved VPNs, which are relatively easy for authorities to surveil, are still permitted.

"VPNs are not risk-free. Authoritarian governments increasingly try to block, slow down, criminalise, or monitor VPN use. In some cases, regimes also promote or tolerate unsafe VPNs that may expose users to surveillance," Professor Yilmaz said.

"So VPNs are both tools of digital survival and sites of political contestation."

Mr Liu said the widespread use of VPNs in China was a highly dynamic tug-of-war between the government and internet users.

"There were previously free VPN services. The low-cost earlier methods that helped people climb the walls are all gone [due to increasing crackdowns]," he said.

"Yet, the need for 'ladders' could not be eliminated."

Mr Liu said because of the large number of services banned in China, many VPN users today were not necessarily dissidents, but people who wanted to see the outside world.

"It gave birth to a lot of paid VPN services. Nowadays, people are prepared to pay."

Lin recently paid 350 yuan ($72) a year for a VPN subscription service.

China's ban inspires Iran, Pakistan

Professor Yilmaz said the impact of China's Great Firewall and VPN ban for neighbouring countries was significant.

He co-authored a paper that examined the diffusion of digital authoritarian practices from China to regional partners, Iran and Pakistan.

"China's neighbours learn from, emulate, and cooperate with China's model of digital control," he said.

He said that when governments faced protests and online dissent, they looked at China's experience and learned from its methods of censorship, surveillance and information control.

He said Iran had looked closely at China's model while developing its own National Information Network.

China's idea of "cyber sovereignty" appealed to authoritarian or hybrid regions, he said.

Research by Professor Yilmaz and colleagues showed that countries like Türkiye and Iran had also treated VPNs as a political threat, because so many dissidents in these countries relied on VPNs to bypass censorship.

"They have restricted unauthorised VPNs, disrupted safe services, and, in some cases, unsafe or counterfeit VPNs have reportedly been used to collect user data," Professor Yilmaz said.

"So the broader impact of China's VPN policy is not only domestic.

"It has helped normalise the idea that states can and should control access to the global internet."