Archive of content related to the crackdown on circumvention tools.
In January 2024, Shanghai entrepreneur Zheng Shuai was taken away by Shaoyang County police because his company developed VPN software. Citing financial difficulties, the police demanded 100 million yuan to "buy freedom." Although Zheng paid the money, he was still arrested. Currently, at least 64.8 million yuan has been credited to the Shaoyang County treasury. The case involves prolonged detention beyond statutory limits without a verdict, and the implicated Public Security Bureau Director Yin Xiangfeng and others were removed from office in July 2025.
During the National Cybersecurity Publicity Week from September 14 to 20, 2026, several universities carried out publicity and education; the course materials listed circumvention of the Great Firewall alongside sensitive photography and overseas part‑time work as high‑risk actions, and marked circumvention of the Great Firewall as illegal access to foreign networks.
On September 14, a university in Henan posted an anti-circumvention propaganda poster, stating that using VPN may involve violating national security and listing risks, which sparked netizen doubts.
On September 11, netizens posted a group chat screenshot on a social platform. In the screenshot, an account self‑identified as “counselor” said the school’s backend could query the circumvention tools students use, the websites they visit, the posts they browse, and the videos they watch, and claimed all records could be retained for traceability. The account demanded that all students immediately uninstall circumvention tools, warned that verified violations would result in disciplinary action, and that serious cases would be transferred to the police (Public Security) for handling, also stating that circumvention would lead to personal information leakage and device infection.
Anhui University plans to build a campus network system for analyzing and controlling politically sensitive network behavior, with China Mobile winning the bid for construction at a cost of 868,000 yuan. The system aims to detect, alert, asynchronously audit, and trace politically sensitive information and activities like "wall-climbing." It is scheduled for acceptance and use by the end of 2026.
On September 10, a netizen posted that they had not subscribed to the campus network but were included in the school's list of people circumventing the Great Firewall. The counselor announced and reprimanded this in the class group, warning that having a record of circumventing the Great Firewall would affect one's entire life, and required the named person to explain the situation and fill out a form.
The Security Department of Nanjing Engineering Institute, during a freshman safety education course, categorized circumventing the Great Firewall as a matter of political security and stated that it is illegal in itself, requiring students not to use circumvention tools and to use official library channels for researching information.
On September 1, 2026, a Chinese university issued a notice requiring students to treat September as a month of concentrated crackdown on circumvention of the Great Firewall, prohibiting access to overseas websites, using overseas game accelerators, or installing circumvention software, with serious penalties for violators. The notice was forwarded by netizens online, sparking attention to university network control.
According to a post by X account Luo Xiang, the contributor who reported on the Three Gorges Dam collapse has gone missing. The whistleblower's final submission included an 'internal use' employee information registration form, which detailed personal political affiliation, family background, overseas connections, contact methods, internet usage habits, assets, and requirements for fingerprint and voiceprint collection.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has warned that Moonshot AI's project, Kimi K3, may be stealing U.S. AI models through "distillation" techniques and could potentially use overseas nodes to hijack access to NVIDIA servers. The U.S. government has added Kimi K3 to the Entity List for sanctions.
X account Luo Xiang posted a video submitted by a netizen showing that some disaster victims in the Hengzhou area of Guangxi staged a protest due to dissatisfaction with post-disaster resettlement. The video footage shows smoke filling the air in the night.
At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Philadelphia, mathematicians Wang Hong and Deng Yu, both born in Guangdong and Guangxi, China, were awarded the Fields Medal, known as the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics." Both studied at Peking University before pursuing further studies and teaching abroad.
A joint assessment by the UK AI Safety Institute and the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) indicates that the performance of China's AI model Kimi K3, particularly in stability and success rates, is significantly lower than leading frontier AI models in the US, and it also performs poorly in developing exploit code.
The Hunan Library issued an announcement on its official WeChat account stating that due to recent incidents where readers used public Wi-Fi to circumvent the Great Firewall and access prohibited overseas websites, posing serious cybersecurity risks, it has temporarily shut down its wireless network for rectification and exposed the mobile phone numbers of some readers.
On the eve of the World Cup final, giant screens in New York's Times Square scrolled images of 'Wangwang,' a mother dog who was a victim of a dog abuse case in China, along with her puppies, aiming to draw international attention to animal abuse in China.