Crackdown on Circumvention Tools · Full chronicle and history

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.

On September 20, the School of Mathematical Sciences of Harbin Engineering University reported that, after verification by higher authorities, 20 undergraduates and graduate students used campus network accounts to access overseas networks via VPN on September 18–19, which was recorded by the network security monitoring system. Because it was their first violation and there were no serious consequences, they were given a warning sanction.

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.

Despite Beijing's dense air defense network and strict low‑altitude control regulations, a small, slow aircraft with weak radar reflectivity still managed to breach the air defense grid and, after about 20 minutes of signal loss, crashed into the CITIC Tower.

The Wall Street Journal reported that last summer, Ding Xuexiang received a closed-door briefing from Huawei on AI, in which Huawei claimed it could achieve Chinese autonomy in key AI fields within three years. Ding was leading the effort to consolidate resources in the chip industry at the time and warned that those who refused to use domestic chips were traitors.

CCTV reported on a live-streaming scam conducted under the guise of rescuing stray cats and dogs. The criminal gang defrauded over 1,500 kind-hearted individuals of more than 2.5 million yuan through false information and intentional animal abuse. The mastermind, surnamed Li, was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison for fraud and fined 200,000 yuan.

US CIA Director Ratcliffe publicly stated that China develops technology through theft, replication, and state subsidies, which is its "success" model. He believes the US is more competitive in the AI field due to its systemic advantages, as individual creativity is restricted by the party-state under the CCP system.

Shortly after the incident, SWAT vehicles equipped with drone countermeasures appeared on Beijing streets, indicating the authorities' strengthened control over low-altitude flying devices.

CITIC Wealth Management published an exclusive interview with Liu Junhua, General Manager of the Special Account Investment Division. The timestamp was 1:03 PM, predating the Chaoyang District government's announcement, seemingly to prove Liu Junhua was still with the company and respond to speculation that he might be a "pilot" (a euphemism for someone who has fled).

A Bilibili aviation blogger relayed an industry insider’s tip, stating that the pilot was a male tech company head in his sixties named Liu Minghua, who, due to a romantic dispute, embezzled public funds and suffered a mental breakdown, leading him to commit suicide by jumping off a building, attempting to downplay the political color of the incident.

The glass curtain wall on the 83rd floor of CITIC Tower in Beijing was breached, causing a fire. Rumors online suggest the aircraft involved may have turned off its transponder and deviated from its course. Building employees were urgently evacuated, and related news was heavily scrubbed on social media.

A single-engine, two-seat light sport aircraft collided with a high-rise building near the East Third Ring Road in Chaoyang District, Beijing, killing the pilot and injuring 13 people on site, sparking widespread attention and speculation about air defense safety.

Financial Times reporter at the takeoff site Shifo Temple Airport witnessed police searching a black Buick sedan and searching the flight school office, showing the authorities' level of concern over the incident.

Xinhua News Agency published an article titled "The Three Great Transformations: An Unprecedented and Profound Social Revolution," stripping away the lessons of history to whitewash the history of joint state-private ownership, releasing a strong political signal regarding the direction of private economic policy.

China passed and implemented the Private Economy Promotion Law on May 20, the first foundational law in New China specifically regulating the private economy.

Xi Jinping convened another symposium on private enterprises, inviting several well-known private entrepreneurs to attend, and emphasized the consistency and unchangeability of policies regarding the private economy.

On November 3, 2020, following Jack Ma's Bund speech criticizing financial regulation, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced the suspension of Ant Group's A-share listing just two days before it was scheduled to go public. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange followed suit immediately, halting the world's largest IPO.

At a symposium on private enterprises, Xi Jinping specifically refuted circulating societal narratives such as the "theory of the exit of the private economy" and the "new joint state-private ownership theory," emphasizing that the fundamental principles and policies of the Party and the state regarding the development of the private economy remain unchanged.

In September 1966, with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, the state completely stopped issuing fixed dividends to former private industrialists and businessmen, prematurely terminating the buyout period and completely zeroing out the status and assets of former capitalists.

In January 1956, Beijing and large and medium-sized cities across the country rapidly completed the state-private joint ownership of entire industries. Through a fixed-interest system, the state peacefully bought out private industry and commerce, marking the basic completion of the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production.