China’s government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals’ access to virtual private networks by February 1, people familiar with the matter said, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet.
China’s government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals’ access to virtual private networks by February 1, people familiar with the matter said, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet.
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Some of the country’s biggest telecom companies — Bloomberg lists state-run China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — are being instructed to block customers from using virtual private networks, a technology that redirects a person’s Internet traffic through other servers to make it look like they are connected to the Web from someplace else.
People walk past outside the China Unicom office building in Beijing. Photo: Reuters
For years, Chinese citizens have used VPNs to circumvent the country’s Great Firewall, the colloquial term for blocks and restrictions imposed on the Internet by Beijing in an effort to ensure that only a filtered version of the Web is visible to most of the country. VPNs have allowed tech-savvy Chinese Internet users to access restricted news sites and social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.
China has periodically clamped down on Internet users’ attempts to evade the Great Firewall. The last such campaign took place in 2016, prompting widespread reports of VPN outages. But the government has intensified its attack on VPNs in recent months. In January, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ruled that all VPNs that did not seek government approval to operate would be deemed illegal. Since then, a slew of VPN providers have been forced to shut down, citing regulatory warnings.
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It’s unclear how the new directive may affect multinationals operating within the country, which already have to contend with a cybersecurity law that imposes stringent requirements on the transfer of data and may give Beijing unprecedented access to their technology. Companies operating on Chinese soil will be able to employ leased lines to access the international web but must register their usage of such services for the record, the people familiar with the matter said.
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“This seems to impact individuals” most immediately, said Jake Parker, Beijing-based vice president of the US-China Business Council. “VPNs are incredibly important for companies trying to access global services outside of China,” he said.
“In the past, any effort to cut off internal corporate VPNs has been enough to make a company think about closing or reducing operations in China. It’s that big a deal,” he added.
