Great Firewall of China getting harder to scale

Great Firewall of China getting harder to scale:

The Straits Times - December 30, 2012
By Ho Ai Li, China Correspondent

Exchange student Lim Wee Kiat, 35, let out a cry of joy at the thought of wrapping up months of research here and going home to Singapore.

"Hallelujah!" he told The Sunday Times two days before he left Beijing on Boxing Day.

It was not so much the glacial weather as the glacial Internet speeds and patchy connection that had made his life frustrating here.

Many foreign websites are blocked here, along with social media sites such as Facebook, under Web controls popularly known as the Great Firewall of China.

But foreigners and a small group of Chinese have been scaling this wall by using a VPN, or virtual private network.




Now, this lifeline is becoming frayed as the authorities tighten Internet controls again, a move likely to hit foreign research and business operations in China.

Paid VPN services were greatly disrupted in the lead-up to the Communist Party's leadership change last month, and things still have not gone back to normal.

Some providers such as Astrill have had to apologise to their subscribers for the disruption.

Access to Google-linked websites has also become rather erratic, as Mr Lim, who depends on Google for searches, would attest to.

According to The Global Times, a nationalistic English-language newspaper, China has beefed up its cyberwall, making it even harder for Web surfers here to circumvent its controls.

More curbs are on the cards: The National People's Congress, China's legislature, gave the green light on Friday to new rules requiring Net users to register real names and to increase the penalties for those who spread untruths online.

"Overall, since commercial Internet access began in China back in 1995, there has been a steady increase in the level and scope of censorship," Mr Duncan Clark, a consultant who has lived in China for 18 years, told The Sunday Times.

While VPN providers, in particular the free ones, have been blocked in the past, paid ones costing US$5 (S$6) to US$7 a month have generally been left untouched, he noted.

"Recently, though, the government has clearly been targeting these VPN providers, preventing new customers from signing up," said Mr Clark, who is chairman of BDA Consultancy.

It is also disabling existing subscribers - especially those using L2TP services, as opposed to PP2P ones, which offer dynamic IP addresses and are perhaps harder to target - he added.

Businesses have also been hit as many depend on VPNs to share confidential data and access global work processes such as payroll, he said.

The efficiency of businesses in getting information from the Internet has been hit by China's enhanced firewall, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

But protests by foreigners and foreign businesses are unlikely to matter, said Hong Kong-based activist Wen Yunchao. Instead, the authorities want to control the flow of information on the Net during a period of leadership transition, he told The Sunday Times.

"They have to prevent dissension and information from outside coming in," he said. Some officials might have been leaking information to overseas Chinese websites to bring down their foes, he added.

The websites of The New York Times and Bloomberg continue to be blocked in China after they ran reports detailing the wealth and connections of the families of leaders Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao in June and November.

There has also been talk that the move to strengthen Web controls is linked to the growing use of micro- blogs to expose official wrongdoing. In recent weeks, whistle-blowers have posted online allegations of misdeeds such as graft, forgery and blackmail by officials.

But media expert Zhan Jiang of the Beijing Foreign Studies University warns against reading too much into the recent online whistle-blowing and the proposed new Internet rules, saying it is unclear why VPN services have been hit.

What is certain, though, is that the VPN disturbance has given companies and individuals a lot of headaches.

It may exact a heavy cost on China in the long run as it goes against China's bid to become a creative and innovative country, said Mr Clark.

Many foreign organisations may choose to move elsewhere if the going remains tough, he added.

However, Beijing resident Lum Kayli, 27, who has been having problems with her VPN service, had resigned herself to Internet curbs even before moving here from Malaysia eight months ago.

"It's annoying but what can you do?" she said.

hoaili@sph.com.sg