China Is Trying to Give the Internet a Death Blow

I live in the only country in the world where the internet gets worse every year — at least if you’re trying to look at YouTube or Twitter or Google or virtually any other large non-Chinese site. For years, the only way to get to such services has been with a virtual private network (VPN), a tool that slips past China’s “Great Firewall” into the freedom of the outside world. Even as the Chinese internet has gotten better, access to the outside has gotten worse. And now it might be cut off entirely, as orders from the government reportedly seek to shut down VPNs altogether, severing even this thin lifeline.

These increased measures aren’t about control of information. They’re about preventing mobilization — about stopping angry Chinese from using the methods practiced at Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Maidan in Ukraine. Match that with an ever more sprawling security state and growing top-down xenophobia, and measures that would have seemed implausibly harsh four years ago now seem highly likely. But these paranoid demands could end up hamstringing the country’s economic and technological ambitions, leaving it stuck in a pit of its own making.