New Bipartisan Senate Bill Would Counter China’s Firewall

‘We must not forget the people of China and their fight for access to information,” said Sen. Ben Cardin.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) speaks at a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 10, 2020. Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images

Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) introduced a bill on Nov. 21 to help bypass the Chinese communist regime’s internet censorship.

“As the United States continues to focus on economic, military, and technological competition with Beijing, we must not forget the people of China and their fight for access to information,” Cardin said in a statement.

Cardin noted that Chinese citizens are increasingly growing skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and seeking alternative sources of information, providing an “unprecedented opportunity to engage with the Chinese citizenry.”

The bill, titled the Informing a Nation with Free, Open, and Reliable Media (INFORM) Act, aims to enable Chinese citizens to access information free from the CCP’s influence and censorship.

The proposed legislation comes at a time when nearly 440 million Chinese have quit the CCP or its affiliated organizations.

It also complements the State Department’s efforts to develop technology to bypass the CCP’s censorship “firewall” and to empower citizen journalists in China.

“One of Xi Jinping’s greatest weaknesses is that he is afraid of his own people,” Sullivan said in a statement. “That’s why the CCP’s vast censorship apparatus—its ‘great firewall’—works to silence free expression and deny their citizens truthful information about the corruption of CCP leaders.”

The INFORM Act would direct the State Department to create a comprehensive plan for engaging with Chinese citizens in the information space. It calls for the U.S. government to produce and disseminate Chinese-language content that would otherwise be inaccessible to Chinese citizens. Additionally, the bill seeks to increase funding for investigative journalism related to real-time developments in China. It would also support the State Department and the U.S. Agency for Global Media collaboration to develop content-sharing tools that can circumvent the CCP’s censorship.

As China’s economic situation worsens, the CCP faces domestic unrest. The Chinese real estate development sector—which had propped up the national economy and made up a significant portion of its gross domestic product for more than a decade—is on the verge of collapse, with the biggest developers bankrupt. The accumulated debt of local governments was $13 trillion as of August 2023, according to Goldman Sachs. Beijing recently issued bonds and freed up financing to stem the tide, but the plan fell far short of the stimulus plan that international experts had expected.

All of this comes at a time when a record number of new college graduates are set to enter a job market with few prospects. Official numbers put the unemployment rate for young people (ages 16–24) at a peak of 21.3 percent in June 2023, but independent analysts say the real number could be at least 46 percent.

Just last month, 3.4 million applicants had registered to compete for next year’s 39,700 public-sector vacancies, official figures show.

Experts previously told The Epoch Times that this may signal the start of a vicious cycle. The anticipation of youth unrest will cause the CCP to clamp down on freedoms, making China unattractive to foreign investment, which then worsens the economic situation and employment picture.

“China’s society is now very fragile,” Edward Huang, an economist and media commentator from Taiwan, previously told The Epoch Times. “Any minor disturbance, gathering, or social movement may have a fatal impact on the CCP.”

Alex Wu contributed to this report.