China’s Internet Censors Play a Tougher Game of Cat and Mouse – New York Times

The shift which could affect a swath of users from researchers to businesses suggests that China is increasingly worried about the power of the internet, experts said.

It does appear the crackdown is becoming more intense, but the internet is also more powerful than it has ever been, said Emily Parker, author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are, a book about the power of the internet in China, Cuba, and Russia. Beijings crackdown on the internet is commensurate with the power of the internet in China.

China still has not clamped down to its full ability, the experts said, and in many cases the cat-and-mouse game continues. One day after Apples move last week, people on Chinese social media began circulating a way to gain access to those tools that was so easy that even a non-techie could use it. (It involved registering a persons app store to another country where VPN apps were still available.)

Still, Thursdays test demonstrates that China wants the ability to change the game in favor of the cat.

A number of Chinese internet service providers said on their social media accounts, websites, or in emails on Thursday that Chinese security officials would test a new way to find the internet addresses of services hosting or using illegal content. Once found, these companies said, the authorities would ask internet service providers to tell their clients to stop. If the clients persisted, they said, the service providers and Chinese officials would cut their connection in a matter of minutes.

The Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Studies suggest that anywhere from tens of millions to well over a hundred million Chinese people use VPNs and other types of software to get around the Great Firewall. While the blocks on foreign television shows and pornography ward off many people, they often pose only minor challenges to Chinas huge population of web-savvy internet users.

Chinas president, Xi Jinping, has presided over years of new internet controls, but he has also singled out technology and the internet as critical to Chinas future economic development. As cyberspace has become more central to everything that happens in China, government controls have evolved.

It is difficult to figure out the extent of the new efforts, since many users and businesses will not discuss them publicly for fear of getting on the bad side with the Chinese government. But some frequent users said that getting around the restrictions had become increasingly difficult.

One student, who has been studying in the United States and was back in China for summer vacation, said that her local VPN was blocked. She said she had taken the period as a sort of meditation away from social media and left a note on Facebook to warn her friends why she was a gone girl.

A doctoral student in environmental engineering in at a university in China said it had become harder to do research without Google, though his university had found alternative publications so that students did not always need the internet. He has since found a new way to get around the Great Firewall, the student said, without disclosing what it was.

Close observers of the Chinese internet said some VPNs still work and that China could still do a lot more to intensify its crackdown.

We do think that if the government has decided to do so, it could have shut down much more VPN usage right now, said a spokesman for VPNDada, a website created in 2015 to help Chinese users find VPNs that work.

If the government had sent more cats, the mice would have a tougher time, said the spokesman, who declined to be named because of sensitivities around the groups work in China. I guess they didnt do so because they need to give some air for people or businesses to breathe.

Chinas online crackdowns are often cyclical. The current climate is in part the result of the lead-up to a key Chinese Communist Party meeting, the 19th Party Congress this autumn. Five years ago, ahead of a similar meeting, VPNs were hit by then-unprecedented disruptions.

Much like economic policy or foreign affairs, censorship in China is part of a complicated and often imperfect political process. Government ministries feel pressure ahead of the party congress to show they are effective or can step in if a problem appears, analysts said.

So its definitely not an apocalypse for VPNs, said Paul Triolo, head of global technology at Eurasia Group, a consultancy.

Just a more complex environment for users to navigate, and new capabilities and approaches give China better ability to shut off some delta of VPN use at a time and place of Beijings choosing, he said.

Chinas population is learning to deal with those difficulties at a younger age. Earlier this summer, Chinas internet giant Tencent began limiting the time that people under 18 were allowed to play the popular online game Honor of Kings to an hour a day for those under 12, and two hours for those age 12 to 18.

So Chinese youths have taken to an age-old solution: getting a fake ID.

Your Honor of Kings being limited? Interested in getting an over-18 identification? read a recent advertisement on Chinese social media. No problem. Get in touch for a low-price ID.

Carolyn Zhang contributed research from Shanghai. Adam Wu contributed research from Beijing.

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinas Internet Censors Test a New Way to Shut Down Access.

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China's Internet Censors Play a Tougher Game of Cat and Mouse - New York Times