New crackdown on VPNs meant to further empower China’s Great Firewall

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology plans to conduct a 14-month “clean-up” of Internet access services, including a major crackdown on virtual private networks, or VPNs. Without official endorsement, no cable business nor VPN can do business inside China, and no individual can use a VPN without permission.

VPNs are already under government scrutiny in China, and directives are often left purposefully vague. But this surge in enforcement seems to be like the last one: aimed at preventing individuals from gaining access to sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are blocked in China.

The last major VPN crackdown happened amid a major anti-corruption push — which also not-coincidentally happened during the closed-door decision-making session of the National People’s Congress in March 2016, when complaints went up that multiple VPNs had gone dark for more than a week, according to the South China Morning Press. Bloomberg explains, “While the country’s top legislature is constitutionally charged with vast powers, the mechanics of one-party rule ensure most important decisions are hashed out in closed-door Communist Party meetings long before reaching the floor.” Wouldn’t want anyone to get wind of how those decisions are being made, from the proverbial horses’ mouths.

China’s controversial Great Firewall is one part of the state censorship and surveillance program officially called the Golden Shield. It has been hotly debated since its inception in the 90s, when the state-sponsored memory hole began its effort to exercise what current President Xi Jinping calls “Internet Sovereignty” — the idea that each country should assert control over its individual patch of the Web.

The Great Firewall itself consists of many different pieces of software. Collectively, they parse HTML traffic for content, intercept and obstruct email, filter IPs, and engage in packet inspection and selective DNS cache poisoning.

This new notice that VPNs are under greater pressure falls directly in line with President Xi’s vision for an ideological renaissance, shaped by a socialist nationalism particular to China — and founded in the enforcement power of the nation’s military.

Under this kind of ideological control, it’s important to the stability of the regime not to let dissent begin to build momentum. Xinhua, the Chinese state-sponsored news agency, says that the Golden Shield is only meant to block “superstitious, pornographic, violence-related, gambling and other harmful information.” Mostly, though, they seem not to want to let the Chinese public read anything pertaining to corruption, poverty, famine, human rights, a counterrevolution, and most especially Tibet.

Sites censored in China include Google, Facebook, and Twitter, plus places like amnesty.org and news.bbc.co.uk. If information is power, the Great Firewall is designed to keep both from the Chinese people. Source: Harvard

The panopticon has taken control in China. Law-abiding citizens have access now to only a walled garden of state-endorsed viewpoints, and they are kept in check by a security state with an increasing reliance on “a massive, ubiquitous architecture of surveillance: the Golden Shield. Ultimately, the aim is to integrate a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network – incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records, and Internet surveillance technologies.” Dystopian future, meet dystopian present.