Li Huanjun, a former primary school teacher in Beijing, began circumventing China’s Internet restrictions sometime in 2011—not long after she found herself standing on the roof of her house, drenched in gasoline, ready to slash at regime-sponsored intruders with the kitchen knife in her hand.
Like countless others Chinese, Li simply minded her own business and had little interest in the country’s vast censorship apparatus—until she became a victim of forced demolition, and needed to educate herself and fight back.
“My first feeling was: Wow, it’s just like magic. I realized that all the stuff on China Central Television and domestic websites was fake. And I found many others who suffered more cruel treatment than me,” she said in a recent telephone interview.
The Chinese authorities don’t like people like Li Huanjun.
Closed Internet Garden
In its bid to make China’s Internet a walled garden, the regime has forced citizens to use their real names when surfing the Web, launched a focused crackdown on virtual private networks, and pursued with a vengeance anyone inside China with the temerity to buck Beijing’s policies.
The only problem is that one crack in the wall, which China’s Internet authorities just can’t seem to patch over: the anti-circumvention technologies developed by a small group of Chinese-American tech entrepreneurs, with names like Freegate and Ultrasurf.
“These companies represent the great David and Goliath story of my lifetime,” said Michael Horowitz, a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has taken a strong interest in the fate of the two anti-censorship outfits.
“A little bit of money has thus far beat billions of dollars and thousands of the ablest people China can bring into the mix. This is a matter of survival for China—and they throw everything at it.”
Freegate and Ultrasurf each employ their own anonymization protocols to allow users in China to access the Internet without impediment—one simply downloads a small program, and the free Internet presents itself.
Data anonymization is the process of destroying tracks, or the electronic trail, on the data that would lead an eavesdropper to its origins. An electronic trail is the information that is left behind when someone sends data over a network.
The applications present a problem for the authorities because the more aggressively they try to shut them down, the greater they risk closing off the Internet entirely—which they want to avoid.
Freedom online has become an especially precious commodity, given China’s recent all out attempts to effectively create its own intranet.
A Raft of Restrictions
The Chinese Communist Party has always sought to control the Internet and block applications like Tor (which it has) and Freegate (which it can’t)—but analysts agree that in the last few months, these efforts have grown in urgency.
The Party in early 2014 publicly revived its “leading group on Internet security and informatization,” which handles the commanding heights of cyberpolicy. The overall goal of this group is to boost China’s indigenous technology industry and bring closer cooperation among the various departments on Chinese Internet policies and controls.
Most recently, their attention has shifted to blocking a host of virtual private networks, or VPNs, widely used by expats and other technically inclined users inside China. Such VPNs, which create an encrypted tunnel from the client computer to a server outside China and access the Internet through that server, typically cost around $10 a month. They allow users to visit Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, and other sites blocked in China, delivering to the reader news and perspectives unavailable on the official Internet.
Businesses in China often rely on VPNs for their basic operational needs—like syncing sales data through Google services, or similar uses. VPN providers like Astrill, Golden Frog, and StrongVPN, all acknowledged in recent statements that their services appeared to have been targeted. Some were able to resume service later, while others suffer intermittent outages.
Gmail was completely blocked late last year, after other Google services were also blocked in about June of last year. Moreover, Chinese cyberforces appear to have begun using so-called man-in-the-middle attacks on users who try to access Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Apple services in China—the attack seeks to intercept and spy on traffic between the user and the service.
Western tech firms in China are also being forced to submit to “security” screenings of their products, and even hand over their source codes. This demand for “secure and controllable” technology triggered the American Chamber of Commerce in China, and other groups, to write a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking for help.
Tightening
Chinese authorities rarely explain why they do the things they do—though it’s clear that these Internet restrictions have been years in the making, and are being rolled out now during a time of broader ideological and political tightening in China.
In newly vigorous propaganda campaigns, “Western” and liberal ideas have been vilified as threats to China, and individuals with liberal sympathies have been put under tremendous pressure to support the Communist Party, with some prominent academics, bloggers, and journalists being jailed.
Economic growth has slowed, putting pressure on the regime, which in any case is going through a dramatic transformation. Xi Jinping, the Party leader, continues his torrid campaign of eliminating opponents—tens of thousands have been investigated—and seizing control over the Party apparatus.
Police State
The new measures restricting the Internet, added onto an already formidable apparatus of censorship and surveillance, all add up to a potent combination. However, perhaps the greatest threat the regime poses to tools like Freegate is not technical, but political, said Paul Rosenzweig, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a cybersecurity consultant.
“Throughout history the authoritarian regimes have made their bones not so much out of their technological prowess, but the pervasiveness of their surveillance. No one is going to use the newest VPN if they’re afraid someone is going to rat them out and they'll wind up in the gulag.”
“There’s no secret technological sauce in what China’s doing,” Rosenzweig said. “It’s just a host of techniques that, layered upon each other, become increasingly effective at shutting down the freedom of information in the network.”
“They’ve devoted a lot more resources than most people, and they’re probably leading in deployment and implementation,” he said.
Still Working
For all those resources, Freegate and Ultrasurf are still kicking, despite intensive efforts by Chinese authorities to track down and shut off their networks of late.
“We still serve roughly hundreds of thousands every day,” said Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, which runs Freegate, in a telephone interview.
He said that many users are still having difficulty accessing Freegate, depending on where in China they are, and that despite the harsh measures against other VPNs, Freegate hasn’t seen much of a commensurate boost in traffic because of China’s blocking mechanisms. “We’re still in the middle of it, so we don’t want to give out any details,” Xia said.
Cecilia Lan, a democracy activist who was part of a group that pushed for rule of law based on China’s 1947 constitution, and who left China late last year, said, “Freegate was the best I ever tried.” It wasn’t the only mechanism, she said—sometimes more ideal were other VPNs, or GoAgent. “But when China shut down VPNs, Freegate stood out because it never gave up. Whenever the Communist Party upgraded the wall, Freegate upgraded itself too.”
Lan is now based in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a good name, too,” Lan said. “Very simple and direct. ‘The Gate to Freedom.’”
Freedom Agenda
Horowitz is keenly aware of the challenges faced by Freegate and its ilk.
On the one hand, “the Chinese firewall effectively has an unlimited budget—it’s hard to think of a single government enterprise in either a dictatorship or democracy where there’s an unlimited budget, and the firewall people have it.”
He added, “And yet there’s these two groups operating on a shoestring.”
Part of the lapse there is due to the paucity of funding that the two companies get, especially from the U.S. government, which has shown little appetite for large-scale support. Freegate is mostly funded privately, which limits its impact—enough to keep the operations going, but “not enough to allow them to have a critical mass effect,” said Horowitz.
If they were able to scale up their operations, getting millions or tens of millions of IP addresses on which to operate their platforms, “it wouldn’t even be worth trying” to shut them down, Horowitz said.
He and others hope that U.S. policymakers will soon see the value of Freegate and similar software, and make available more funding.
Even now when demand spikes, Freegate has to ration access to its servers.
This, though, has an upside: Freegate’s efforts under pressure from China and with little money have made them more resilient than ever. “It’s in adversity that one learns,” Horowitz said. When U.S. policymakers come around to the idea of genuinely supporting the services, Horowitz said, “It will be infinitely harder for China to do anything.”
America ought to take an interest in the freedom of China’s Internet for the same reason it cared about the free flow of information into Soviet Russia, Rosenzweig said. “Authoritarian regimes maintain their power by restricting the access of their citizens to information that would upset the status quo. I get why they want that—but fundamentally, America’s interests are not aligned with theirs.”
Chen Guangcheng on Freegate
Chen Guangcheng is a well-known Chinese rights activist who has lived in the United States since 2012, shortly after a daring escape from house arrest. For several years in China he used Freegate and other anti-censorship software; he spoke about his experiences in a telephone interview with Epoch Times.
Freegate was really, really common. You could download it anytime and use it as you pleased. It was easy to open, and very small. It upgrades by itself. If your friends want to use it, you can just email it to them. And the key thing is that the Communist Party can’t block it. You can read all about foreign news—it has all the important overseas news websites on the front page, you just click.
Freegate has had a huge impact on the awakening of the Chinese people. The Communist Party has suppressed it in the media, it doesn’t allow any reports about it, even negatively. If the Party prosecuted people for using it, it would be like free advertising because no one believes them. When the Communist Party said to go west, everyone knows that they should go east. But even though it wasn’t publicized, everyone still used it. If you have one person in a group of friends who uses it, then soon everyone has it. And it goes from group to group. It’s had a huge impact on China—that’s obvious.
We started using it in 2003. Later, in a conversation, one would mention, “We have a software we’re using …” and then find that others said, “Oh, we’re using Freegate, too!” Other software includes Ultrasurf and VPNs, however I always used Freegate because I found it the most convenient. I don’t know the situation in China now. And I couldn’t use it after 2006 because they stole my computer. Of course, after coming to the United States, I haven’t had to use it.
The United States government should absolutely support them. The developers are amazing. The money belongs to the American taxpayer anyway, and if they just used a little bit to support Freegate, it would be an investment in the basic values of America. And the Communist Party’s firewall would collapse. It’s the Berlin Wall of the Internet, and it does the greatest harm to China.”
