Last year, Chinese authorities substantially expanded the list of banned foreign news services, including The Globe and Mail. Apple has deleted hundreds of VPNs from its App Store in China. People have been arrested for their posts on Twitter, which is inaccessible on the Chinese internet.
The arrests and fines follow a series of other measures that suggest a broad new effort to choke off access to information unsanctioned by Beijing, as schools, government offices and workplaces alike increase demands for conformity to the Communist Party’s ideological dictates. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source because people who work against internet blocks risk arrest. The point of these police efforts is to send signals to others that no form of circumvention is acceptable, said a co-founder of, which monitors and seeks to skirt Chinese censorship.
In some cases, police have punished trading companies that were using VPN software to access the wider internet for the purposes of “international networking.” In most cases, offenders are punished with an on-the-spot admonishment.īut police have also issued fines, confiscated thousands of dollars earned through online activity, seized routers and ordered "the suspension of networking,” effectively cutting off users from the internet. Now, however, detailed records published online by Zhejiang province show authorities moving against the very act of accessing unapproved parts of the internet through VPNs that are not government-approved. But tens of millions of Chinese people have used censorship circumvention software to “cross the wall" and browse everything from pornography to foreign academic resources, with few repercussions. The Great Firewall of China, the thicket of technological obstacles that filters the global internet, erects barriers for virtual private networks or VPNs – which defeat Internet blocks by smuggling data – often rendering them unusable. encourages Canada to hit China with sanctions over UyghursĬhina warns Canada not to damage relations further with ‘lies’ about Uyghur genocide 24, for example, police seized a person named Zhang Tao, who was penalized for using Lantern “to illegally visit the Wikipedia website for information.” Wikipedia was accessible to Chinese internet users until April, 2019.Ĭanada must refuse to kowtow to China about Taiwan’s democracy Using a 1996 law formulated at the dawn of the internet in China, authorities have escalated a campaign against censorship circumvention tools, arresting people for using popular services such as Astrill and Lantern to access YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia and other websites. Police in China are making arrests and issuing fines for people and companies using software to access blocked internet content in a widening crackdown on those who “illegally access international networks.”