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The Great Wall of China is one of its best-known elements, designed to protect the Chinese people and their national identity, and protect them from prying eyes. But the country now has a more modern twist and is built very differently from its historic construction. Counterparty, it is based on many of the same reasons.
We are talking about the Great Firewall of China, the colloquial term to refer to the country’s extensive and unprecedented regime of censorship and web control. In an effort to suppress dissenting voices, social stability, and publicize domestic businesses, China’s Great Digital Wall has blocked more than 8,000 websites.
And some of your favorites are likely to be among them. Below, we explore the maximum number of internet sites blocked in China in 2023, as well as those that don’t.
We’ll explain why China bans Internet sites and how, whether you’re traveling to China to paint or do business, or already living there, you can safely bypass this censorship by using a personal virtual network (VPN) to maintain access to the sites. . You have to live and paint.
The Chinese government blocks some (and censors the content of others) for various political, socio-cultural, and economic reasons.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has retained the country’s leadership since 1949, maintaining a one-party socialist formula and accompanying China’s political, economic and social structures. By 2023, China will officially be an internationally communist country, with the CCP. restricting the freedom of expression, assembly and organization of its citizens and maintaining an iron grip on its political power.
To do this, the PCC will have to limit the dissemination of any data that contradicts its own views, policies, ideology or authority. That is why the PCC censors Internet sites that criticize its government or promote democracy, human rights, or independence movements. .
The CCP also fails to address sensitive issues from China’s past, including:
In posh China, the CCP stays strict with all media, the internet, and the country’s public discourse to maintain political stability and prevent the spread of criticism that contradicts its own.
The PCC uses web censorship to achieve social stability, blocking content that may simply incite protests, strikes, demonstrations, or other bureaucracy of civil unrest.
As a country with a wide diversity of ethnic groups, cultural identities and languages, China also blocks content that peddles separatist movements or advocates greater independence in autonomous regions (such as Tibet and Xinjiang). It has a unified national identity and promotes the belief of a single society. and impregnable China.
In addition, the Chinese government censors content it deems to be in contradiction to its classical values, blocking content it deems morally or culturally irrelevant to the point of social conservatism. This includes pornography and any LGBTQIA content.
While China’s censorship policy is basically similar for political and social reasons, it also has many economic motivations.
By censoring foreign apps and websites, China protects and promotes domestic and generation companies.
Instead of WhatsApp, China owns Tencent’s WeChat; instead of Slack, it has DingTalk, owned by Alibaba; that Wikipedia, is Baidu Baike, owned by Baidu. Since local giants dominate China’s tech space, the government can spur job creation, economic growth, and higher tax revenues.
There is also an argument that, by controlling online content, the Chinese government can make its online marketplaces run smoothly and seamlessly, thereby building customer trust and contributing to the expansion of its virtual economy.
But the most important thing? While no company operating in China can refuse to comply with Chinese content censorship, foreign companies can at least decide not to offer their facilities in their market. However, Chinese companies do not have this luxury; therefore, by blocking popular corporations abroad, China is incentivizing the corporations it has under its control to make a profit, while remaining firmly under its control.
The 10 most sensible banned websites, apps and accessories in China are:
In 2021, China blocked the BBC from broadcasting to its citizens, banning BBC World News on Chinese airwaves.
At the time, the BBC was covering a variety of very sensitive issues for China, adding allegations of torture and rape of Uighurs in “re-education” camps, as well as the country’s competitive coronavirus testing policies and incorrect reporting on Covid-19. 19 death figures. .
Soon after, Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, revoked China’s licence to broadcast its English-language news channel, CGTN, in the UK. In a statement, Ofcom said CGTN is “ultimately controlled through the Chinese Communist Party” and accused it of submitting misleading statements regarding its ownership.
Among analysts – who concluded that, since BBC World News was already heavily censored in China, this resolution would not have a massive impact – BBC censorship is seen as more of a political rather than a media measure; a kind of “warning shot” through the CCP to remind foreign media that reports that contrast with China’s own prospects will not be tolerated.
This precept has also led the CCP to block a host of other Western media, and it reads like the who’s who of global news: CNN, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, TIME, Guardian and New York. Not all schedules are in mainland China.
China began blocking Instagram (albeit intermittently) in 2014, and the American social media picture- and video-sharing app has been blocked full-time in China since September 2014 as part of an ongoing crackdown on Western social media bureaucracy.
This is a prohibition that, at the time of writing, includes:
Blocked amid the surge of protests in Hong Kong from September to December 2014 (and the related umbrella movement), the Instagram ban in China is in a position to block the spread of potentially anti-Chinese content posted through its users. Censorship of each and every part of Instagram content as it appears (the 1. 3 billion images, one hundred million publications and more than one billion daily stories) would be impossible; A total ban is much easier.
After a series of mysterious service outages, Chinese Gmail users were — and eventually — cut off from the popular email service in December 2014.
The block (which also includes Google Play and G Suite apps like Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar and Maps) has its antecedents in a dispute between Google and the Chinese in 2010.
When the CCP asked Google to censor its search effects for Chinese users, it refused, left Beijing, and temporarily moved to Hong Kong.
Since then, Google and China have had a tense relationship. However, the biggest impact of this debate has been the Chinese people, who do not have a messaging service that is available to around 1. 8 billion people worldwide.
Some of Google’s remain, however, albeit in censored form. Chinese netizens can still access Google’s search engine from the mainland, but they will be redirected to its Hong Kong (Google. com. hk) service and the results they get will be censored. through the PCC.
Gmail and the G Suite line sign up for a number of other productivity apps, adding Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Hootsuite, which are banned in mainland China.
With more than 551 million monthly listeners in the second quarter of 2023, Spotify is the world’s most popular music streaming service. However, those totals are recorded without listeners from mainland China, for whom Spotify has been blocked since October 2008 (just two years later). Creation of Spotify in 2006).
China has long blocked foreign options that could compete with its own domestic options. In this case, that option is QQ Music, China’s leading music streaming service, owned by Tencent Music Entertainment Group.
After becoming operational in May 2001, the Chinese Wikipedia (Wikipedia as it is known to the Western world, although written in vernacular Chinese (a form of Mandarin)) was first blocked on June 3, 2004. Just 19 days later, access was mysteriously restored. , before disappearing (this time for only 4 days) in September of the same year.
Wikipedia was shut down in China in October 2005, before a confusing decade of blocking, unblocking and availability with partial censorship. Ironically, there is an entire essay on the subject on Wikipedia itself; inaccessible in China.
Since 2015, Wikipedia has been banned in mainland China. According to Wikipedia itself, this blocking is due to Wikipedia’s use of HTTPS encryption, which has made it more complicated for the Chinese government to selectively censor Wikipedia content.
The online encyclopedia, maintained through its network of volunteers, attracts around 2 billion unique visits a month. The Wikipedia ban has allowed Baidu Baike (a Chinese-language internet encyclopedia owned by Baidu, China’s 29th largest company by market capitalization) to thrive. Unlike Wikipedia, Baidu Baike meets the CCP’s censorship requirements, so it’s easy to see why this is the government’s preferred (and local) option.
DuckDuckGo and Amazon Alexa are blocked search engines in China, while Bing is still available, albeit in a heavily censored form.
In 2013, Iran blocked at least 963 articles (including Emma Watson’s biography) that raised ethical and social objections, while in 2017, Turkey banned Wikipedia for about 3 years for opposing a Wikipedia article on state terrorism. which described Turkey as a sponsor of al-Qaeda and Isis.
Used by more than 2. 7 billion people worldwide every month, WhatsApp, owned by Meta, is the world’s most popular messaging app. This is not the case in China.
The CCP joined Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates on WhatsApp in mainland China in 2017.
WhatsApp is blocked because it uses end-to-end encryption to protect the privacy of its users’ messages, meaning the Chinese government can’t access them to spy on them or censor their content.
Instead, most Chinese speak through WeChat, which has more than 1. 32 billion active users. WeChat (which, like QQ Music, Spotify’s Chinese choice, is owned by Tencent) is subject to strict surveillance by the CCP’s web censors and will have to comply with Chinese intelligence laws. This is yet another example of the Chinese government blocking Western apps to gain advantage from its own corporations, corporations that it can in turn force to cooperate with its authoritarian censorship regime.
To its prohibition by the Chinese authorities, WhatsApp is added through the messaging applications Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Line, Viber and the Korean application KaKao Talk.
With Google on China’s red list, it’s no surprise that one of the corporations it owns, video-sharing colossus YouTube, is also blocked in China.
YouTube was first blocked in China for a period of five months, between October 2007 and March 2008, before being banned again, this time indefinitely, in late March 2009.
The reasoning? On YouTube, around 3. 7 million new videos are uploaded every day, making censorship a logistical nightmare and resource-intensive, if not impossible. While much of the Western world (including many Chinese expats) criticizes the island’s oppressive political, social, and economic policies, many are turning to video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube, for a percentage of their views. And those are not reviews that China is willing to allow its citizens to entertain.
In addition to YouTube, other video-sharing platforms banned in China include Vimeo, DailyMotion, Twitch, and Periscope, as well as music streaming such as Pandora, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud.
Not only songs or videos are censored, but also written words. China has also banned its mainland citizens from accessing popular blogging platforms, adding Medium and Blogspot, as well as WordPress. com sites not hosted privately.
Snapchat adds to a litany of Western social media platforms banned in China.
There are several reasons at play here. The first is the most obvious: Snapchat, by facilitating photo and video sharing, poses an uncontrollable risk to social stability and cultural uniformity that China is desperate to protect.
The second? Although it has an office in Shenzhen, Snap Inc, Snapchat’s majority shareholder, has no servers there. The Chinese government requires companies that process Chinese data to keep their servers in mainland China (which, of course, of course, makes it less difficult to access for censorship purposes), this automatically excludes Snapchat from the Chinese market.
That said, a review of Snapchat’s ownership shows that Tencent (which, remember, also holds the pie of opportunities from Spotify and WhatsApp, QQ Music and WeChat, respectively) bought a 12% stake in Snap Inc in 2017.
This shows that, although the Chinese government is wary of the influence of Western social media on its population and the capital flight represented by Chinese investment in foreign corporations, Chinese corporations have a different opinion. Still, Snapchat is still banned in China, and despite Chinese investment, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be replaced anytime soon.
Quora, an online query and response page that allows users to post and respond online to queries from other users, has more than three hundred million active users per month, with up to 5,000 queries made each day.
China has blocked Quora since 2018, fearing that such sharing of open data will harm the social and cultural unity of its people. Quora is also an incredibly politically charged platform: users’ propensity to adopt revisions that the Chinese regime’s strict and repressive policies are strong.
Founded in 2011, Zhihu has become the closest Chinese equivalent to Quora. However, the questions and answers circulating on Zhihu, as well as on similar Chinese online networking forums like Weibo and Douban, tend to revolve around less sensitive topics, such as gossip and celebrity movies, than politics.
However, as we also saw with the Chinese government’s sanctions against QQ Music in 2021, Beijing is not afraid to subject its own corporations to its strict censorship policy. It also led to harsh arguments with Zhihu, Duban and Weibo in 2021. when he criticized those corporations for the “illegal” and “forbidden” data circulating on their platforms. The Chinese government did not specify what the data was.
As China’s decision to ban productivity platforms like GSuite, Dropbox and OneDrive shows, it’s not afraid to block enterprise-level enterprise teams, and Slack is no exception.
While the corporate communication tool, which will have 42. 7 million users by 2023, is a staple for businesses across the Western world, it is locked in China. Instead, the country’s administrative staff relies heavily on apps, adding Tencent’s WeCom (formerly WeChat Work). ) and Alibaba Group’s DingTalk. Both meet the Chinese government’s censorship needs, something Slack’s founders probably wouldn’t do.
By now, it would arguably be less difficult to list popular apps and facilities that haven’t been banned in China: what sites can you access when you live, work, or are in China?
StreamingArray, which adds Netflix and Disney, is yet to be achieved, but with a caveat. While you can access those platforms’ internet sites from mainland China, you may not be able to view any content on them, simply because the country hasn’t. I did not authorize them. The titles available in streaming differ anywhere in the world.
Where Google and Meta failed, Apple succeeded, and FaceTime and iMessage are available in China. Since 2023, no Western bank has had its online page or mobile apps blocked. Therefore, you deserve to be able to see and access your cash when you are in China.
When it comes to social media platforms, LinkedIn isn’t banned in China — it just doesn’t have a presence there. After a launch in China in 2014 with limited capacity (users couldn’t, for example, post articles and there was no social media), the Chinese government cracked down on LinkedIn in March 2021, giving it 30 days to comply with government requirements. Content regulation policies. Later that year, LinkedIn completely shut down its platform in China and relaunched it under another name, InJobs. But in 2023, that too was ruled out.
Similarly, Amazon is not locked in China, but in 2019 closed its operations there to cross-border sales to Chinese consumers. Similarly, eBay isn’t blocked in China: it just failed to identify itself there.
The difficulties of eBay, LinkedIn and Amazon in the Chinese market imply that the failure of Western brands in this market is not due to the fact that they are blocked there, but rather to the fact that in China they do not have the dominant and attractive strength of their Chinese counterparts.
For anyone to access the Internet in China, here is the situation:
In China, you can access the web via Wi-Fi (which hotels, cafes, and restaurants offer for free) or by picking up a SIM card at the airport when you arrive.
The Chinese Internet is provided through a trio of Internet Service Providers (ISPs): China Unicom, China Mobile, and China Telecom. They are all state-owned, so regardless of which company you choose, your searches will be very limited and the effects censored.
So what can you do about it?
In 2023, the simplest and most convenient way to bypass Chinese censorship is to use a VPN. With a VPN, you can hide your device’s IP address with another IP address, from at most anywhere in the world. A VPN is like a proxy server in that it hides where your traffic is coming from. However, VPNs have the added advantage of funneling this traffic between the VPN network and your device through an encrypted tunnel, a procedure known as a Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel.
Through an IP address from another country (e. g. the UK), you can access internet sites available in the UK, even if you are physically located in China. You can continue to watch Netflix; buy on Amazon; Interact with your fans on Facebook, X and Instagram. pay attention to your favorite albums on Spotify; Communicate with your colleagues in Slack. or access unbiased and unbiased data on sites like the BBC, just as you would at home.
However, using a VPN in China has one main limitation – VPN sites are blocked there as well. That’s why, if you’re going to China and don’t need to have your regular apps and equipment cut off, we recommend installing a VPN before you arrive.
That said, VPNs may not protect you from everything and have limitations. VPN:
Another disadvantage of VPNs is that they charge money. VPNs are billed based on a subscription (usually monthly or yearly), so fees can increase. However, while there are free VPNs available, they don’t offer the same point of coverage or features like paid subscriptions.
As a less expensive option to bypass censorship in China, the Tor network can help. Short for “The Onion Router,” it’s a free, open-source app that you can download for your browser and, like a VPN, it’s designed for your online privacy and anonymity.
Like an onion, the Tor network hides traffic through layers of servers managed through volunteers called “nodes” or “relays. “Each node knows which precedes it and which follows, thus masking the origins and destinations of the knowledge packets.
That said, the Tor network could be more effective not alone, but in combination with a VPN. And the best VPNs offer Tor as an additional security option.
Connecting to the Tor network is more complicated in China, although impossible. For more information on how to bypass the Great Firewall from China’s attempts to block network searches, see the Tor consultant for connecting to the Tor network from China.
Are you going to China and need to stay on your favorite websites?Here’s how:
Access to blocked Internet content and sites in China is important, especially when it comes to keeping in touch with family and friends and staying informed about what’s happening in the world beyond China’s borders.
But unlocking content never comes at the expense of your security. So here are our most sensible tips for maintaining online privacy and avoiding censorship safely while you’re in mainland China:
China is a lovely place. From the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, the country is full of stunning herbaceous panoramas, remnants of past dynasties, and magnificent ancient sites, not to mention the Great Wall (the real one, of course).
Add to that its friendly and welcoming locals, and you have each and every explanation for why to live, work, and vacation in China, as long as you do so with professional experience.
China’s authoritarian government is one of the least democratic in the world. Swift and brutal action is needed to silence dissenting voices, stifle the past, offer or in the long term oppose his regime through censorship and manipulation of content across the country.
When you’re having trouble accessing the web in China, then (and use a VPN or proxy server to bypass web censorship) be mindful of that data to stay as long as possible, whether you’re traveling or when accessing the web.
Don’t take any chances; search, select, download, and a VPN before you go.
Facebook and Instagram are blocked in China, so the only way to access those internet sites is to install a VPN before arriving in China.
VPNs are illegal in China, but they are severely limited by the country’s authoritarian government. Official policy states that government-approved VPNs are banned.
Therefore, consumers can use VPNs legally in China. Chinese nationals caught promoting or creating VPNs have been sentenced to prison terms and fines (albeit unevenly applied), but foreigners caught in a VPN are less likely to face severe penalties.
By converting the geolocation of your device’s unique IP address to that of a worldwide server, proxy servers can be incredibly effective at circumventing censorship in countries where online content is manipulated and regulated.
However, a VPN (especially several VPNs, combined with the Tor network) are the most reliable for unblocking content abroad.
Circumventing web censorship in China can have legal consequences: and the Chinese government has arrested and prosecuted others who tried to allow website blocking by creating and distributing VPNs. And if you’re not careful about how you browse the web in China. . . And the equipment it uses to do so confidentially: it can provoke anger or more intense surveillance by Chinese authorities.
Other, perhaps less serious, dangers come with slower web speeds when using a VPN in China or an outage in your web service. Using a disreputable VPN can also expose you to greater cybersecurity dangers, leaving you vulnerable to hacking, knowledge theft, or malware attacks. .
Since Google is not available, Bing and Yandex are alternatives, although heavy censorship of their search effects means that only answers that the Chinese government deems appropriate are located.
For online searches, China is basically based on Baidu, which holds more than 75% of the market. However, Baidu only indexes sites that use simplified Chinese characters. Therefore, the effects it produces are necessarily entirely in Mandarin. And without Google Translate, which is blocked, you’ll have to look for some other way to translate them if you don’t speak the language.
Rob is a developer and publisher with extensive experience in many topics, including renewable energy and appliances, home security, and enterprise software. He has written for Eco Experts, Home Business, Expert Market, Payments Journal and Yahoo!Finance.
Rob is passionate about smart technology, online privacy, the environment, and renewable energy, which brings him to independent counsel where he writes about similar topics such as cybersecurity, VPNs, and solar energy.
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