The Decibel - Leak reveals China is exporting internet censorship technology

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

China’s Great Firewall blocks social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok, along with certain political topics, streaming platforms, and even Google. For years, we’ve heard about what China’s firewall keeps out — but much less about how it’s achieved. Now, a massive leak is shedding light on how the country’s censorship technology works and which countries it’s being exported to.Today, the Globe’s Asia Correspondent, James Griffiths is here. He’s an expert on China’s online censorship, and he’s the author of The Great Firewall of China. He’ll explain what the leak exposes, which countries China is replicating its firewall in, and what it all means for the country’s growing global influence.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

China has censored its internet for decades. And the technology behind it is known as the Great Firewall of China. It blocks social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok, but also certain political topics, streaming platforms like Netflix, and even Google. We've heard a lot about what China's firewall keeps out, but much less about how the country does it, until now. A massive leak of internal documents about a Chinese company called Gij Networks has provided rare insight into the ongoing evolution of the Great Firewall.

And it reveals that this technology is now being exported to other countries around the world. Today, the Globe's Asia correspondent James Griffiths is here. He's an expert on this topic, and he's the author of the Great Firewall of China. He'll walk us through what the leak exposes, who China is exporting its censorship technology to and what it all means for the country's growing global influence. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi James, it's great to be talking to you again.

Thanks for having me. To start, can you just tell us what exactly is the Great Firewall? Like, what does it do? So the Great Firewall is a term that is used by critics to refer to China's vast online censorship and surveillance apparatus, which kind of operates on a huge number of levels, you know, within internet companies and internet service providers in China, and then also at the kind of borders of the internet and China, so where the Chinese internet intersects with the global internet. And at its simplest level, it operates much like an office or school

firewall does, in that it blocks websites that the government doesn't want people to be able to access. But it's also a lot more sophisticated than that, because it also, you know, can do what's called deep packet inspection, which looks into the traffic and looks for websites that maybe aren't blocked, but should be blocked. And it also can block various means of getting around those blocks. So it can block things like virtual private networks or other anti-censorship tools. And so it's, you know, very, very effective at controlling what people can see online in China. And then also within the Chinese internet, it's very effective at controlling what they can say and also, you know, imposing repercussions if people say the wrong thing.

So you're touching on this right now, but can you just expand on this? What exactly is China's motivation with the Great Firewall? So since the development of the Internet in China in the kind of 1990s and into the early 2000s, there was always a very clear intention to bake these types of Internet controls into the Internet as it developed. And the fear there was not so much information control, though that's often what it kind gets pointed to, and that's the stereotype of the Great Firewall. You know, people think about it blocking things.

like information about the Tiananmen Square massacre or other things the government doesn't want people to know. And while that is an element of it, the most important thing it does is it prevents people from using the internet to organize and to kind of spread solidarity among various groups. And so that's the government's main concern is they don't want a independent platform for people to use to organize against the government more than anything else. That's much more important. That's the number one thing that gets censored in China is talk about organizing, regardless of what the topic is. Okay. What did we learn about how the great firewall works from this leak? So what's fascinating about this leak is that in the past, we've been able to get a glimpse of how the firewall works because obviously we can see the effects. We can see that websites

are blocked. We can see that types of posts are taken down in China, and we can see that certain types of tools like virtual private networks and other anti-censorship tools either don't work or struggle to work in China. But we've always been looking at it from the outside. And what this leak has enabled us to see is how that works from the other side and, you know, literally how there is a company whose whole raison d'etra is to enact these blocks and develop new tools to empower censorship and to reverse engineer anti-censorship tools and then find new ways of blocking them. And so we can really see how the Great Firewall functions from the perspective of those who are essentially administrating it. And James, you mentioned their virtual private networks, VPNs. I think many people have heard about this, but can me just take a quick moment to explain like how those work? Because, you know, we do kind of get around firewalls with VPNs.

Yeah, so most people are probably familiar with the VPN from using one at work or maybe in university. It's, you know, it's a way to connect to another network, a virtual network, as the name suggests. And so, you know, maybe if you're away from the office, you use a VPN to get onto your office network so you can access certain websites that will be inaccessible from the open internet. People often also in the West use VPNs to get around things like geo-blocking on certain Netflix shows and things like that. And they're very effective at getting past kind of basic levels of censorship because it encrypts and masks all of your traffic. So your file can't tell what website you're going on. All your traffic looks the same. It's all encrypted. It's all

masked. And so it either has to block it all or let it all through. And so that's a very kind of basic, an easy way of getting around certain levels of censorship, but in places like China and other authoritarian countries, they have means of blocking or filtering VPN traffic, which can make that a lot more difficult. James, before we dig further into the details of this leak, how exactly did you find out about this? Yeah, so last year, I was invited to join a consortium of researchers and other journalists who have been given access to this huge trove of data from Geech networks, about 100,000 files, both from within Geage and then also this related university laboratory Mezzalab. And this includes both documents, HR documents,

onboarding materials, minutes of meetings, things like that, but also source code of a lot of the company's apps and tools. And we were able to kind of comb through this. So we spent, you know, the best part of a year digging through all of this, Intersect did a lot of work, kind of reverse engineering the tools to see how they worked and get a better understanding of how exactly the company functioned. And then we were just kind of digging through all of this huge rooms of data for various nuggets into kind of who the company's customers were, how they operated, how they've expanded over the years, what kind of capabilities they're providing to their customers and things like that. Just high level here, James, what does this leak tell us

is happening? So it shows us two things. Both, as I already mentioned, it shows us kind of how the Great Firewall works from the side of the people who are building it and operating it. And that's a really interesting thing. That confirms a lot of past reporting. It confirms a lot of things that I've written about previously. But also it shows us another thing that we've only been able to see the effects of before and not see how it's actually happening behind the scenes, which is how the Great Firewall is exported to other countries.

Each is a major player in the export of censorship and surveillance technology to mainly authoritarian regimes around the world. and really leveling up and empowering those regimes to build their own versions of the Great Firewall. Wow, wow. So we're seeing this technology now, not only in China, but in other authoritarian regimes. Talk about Gij here now. So how exactly is this company doing this? So Gige is one of a number of companies, both within China and around the world, that kind of provide this type of censorship tool. They build, you know, more sophisticated firewalls for internet service providers to install or, you know, work with government clients and security service clients to install firewalls and kind of snooping technology on internet connections. And they operate both within

China and outside of China, but with a very kind of specific focus on censorship. So, you know, their main kind of USP, as it were, seems to be their ability to reverse engineer and then sabotage anti-censorship tools. You know, we saw a lot of work in the leak of them working to block VPNs, working to find a way to block more sophisticated anti-censorship tools. And they things like that. And it makes sense that they would be this sophisticated because they, you know, they have very strong connections to both the Chinese state and also the development of the Great Firewall itself. One of the co-founders of Geige is a mangle fan Bing Xing, who is known as the father of the Great Firewall in China. He's a very, very important Chinese technologist and intellectual who was, you know, instrumental in

developing censorship in China. And he is now involved in this private or semi-private company, which is continuing to make that censorship in China more sophisticated and export. overseas. And just to connect these dots here, James, Gij is directly working with the Chinese government? In China, yeah, absolutely. We can see them having contracts to essentially run the Great Firewall in China. The Great Firewall in China refers to this kind of web of various censorship and surveillance tools and that these operate slightly differently in different Chinese provinces. Gij is active in at least three provinces we could see in Xinjiang, which is in very, very heavily surveilled and censored region, but also in Jiangsu and Fujian. And so they are

working directly with the Chinese government there. They have links to government back to universities and other entities. And they are also, even in their overseas work, there are government links because they are generally going into countries that are members of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is kind of a huge Chinese infrastructure project, and are also kind of part of what is called the Digital Silk Road, which is the kind of internet technology side of the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI. Okay. So let's talk about this exportation. So we learned from this leak that Gij Networks has been exporting this tech and their services around the world. So beyond China, where else are they operating?

Yes, that was another interesting thing that we learned. You know, they kind of boast on their website about numbers of clients and numbers of installations, but don't say exactly where they're operating. And so within the leak, we were able to see that one of their earliest clients was their government of Kazakhstan, which bought the kind of Gigi's flagship projects called the Tengo Secure Gateway, and that's essentially a kind of mini version of the Great Firewall. But then beyond that, they're also working in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Pakistan and also, interestingly, another country which we were unable to identify, which just has a codename in the documents called A24. And the other countries are all codenamed by the year that Gigi started working there.

So, you know, at Kazakhstan, it's like K-18, Pakistan's P-19. So we can assume it's a country that starts with A and they began work there last year, but we were not able to positively identify which country that. is. But clearly they are expanding and we can see in the documents and even in kind of public statements that Gie just done and job postings and things like that, there is a strong intention to expand further. Wow, that's fascinating. Can you help me understand what did Gija services do for these countries that they couldn't do before? A lot of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries want to control the internet. There's obvious reasons for doing that, preventing people from organizing against the government, preventing the kind of spread of information you don't want people to

have access to. But, you know, while it's easy to do simple internet filtering to block certain websites from your country, you know, companies do this all over the world all the time. But it is very difficult to block means of circumventing those blocks. So it's difficult to block VPNs. It's difficult to block people from using proxies and other means of getting around your firewall. And that's where countries like this might in the past have struggled. They might have set up simple blocks, but, you know, activists and people in the know would have been able to get around them pretty easily. What a company like Geed provides is a really high level of sophistication and, you know, massive capabilities when it comes to internet censorship that particularly

developing countries, but even, you know, quite developed countries that maybe don't have a specialist tech sector would not be able to have otherwise. You know, if this company wasn't providing these services or companies similar to this weren't providing these services, these government wouldn't necessarily be able to do it of their own back. And so they're really upgrading the amount of censorship and the strength of censorship in these countries. Interesting. So it's kind of this technology is being offered to them. So they don't have to figure it out themselves. It's just kind of like a one-stop shop and they're able to kind of export that great firewall into their country. Exactly. And, you know, we used to not that long ago, probably only a decade ago,

we used to look at China as a very unusual country for the amount of internet control the government and exercised and for the type of censorship that you saw in China, and it was kind of assumed that you couldn't really roll that out to other countries because, A, China had baked it in from the beginning, and also it would kind of be difficult to take away people's internet access once they got used to it. And unfortunately, what we've seen since then is the popularization of this type of censorship, you know, partly because of the type of work that companies like Gij do, which has made it easier and cheaper to roll out this type of internet control, and that's kind of gradually spread around the world.

We'll be right back. James, what does this type of censorship? What does it mean for the people in these countries? So I think we take two examples that really kind of spell that out. And one is that in Myanmar, straight after the February 21 coup, we saw the government employee gauge to enact a huge sweeping ban on VPNs in Myanmar and also to help cut off parts of the country from the internet. And that helped, you know, quash some levels of organizing, you know, obviously not hugely successfully.

Myanmar is now in a massive civil war that's been going on for years. But it enabled the government to really kind of rest control over the internet from the kind of private sector and also stop civil society groups from using it to organize online. And it made it a lot more costly to get around those blocks within Myanmar and, you know, really cut people off for a certain amount of time from key information about a country that was plunging into a civil war. And, you know, Myanmar has not been able to do it as successfully, but this is kind of following a model that it has been used in China where, you know, there are protests and there are strikes and civil unrest within China. You know, it's a huge country. There are, you know, people get angry and people want to kind of take to the streets for various reasons. But those protests have never become a national movement in part because of the censorship and surveillance that's in place. So, you know, information about protests is prevented from spreading online.

and people are prevented from using the internet to organise or call for more protests. And we can see, I think, you know, even this month, you know, both how a government can try and enact that type of control and also how people can use internet freedoms to kind of push back against it. And that's kind of what we've seen in Nepal, where Nepal has tried to block a lot of foreign internet services, so Facebook, WhatsApp, things like that. And that actually sparked massive protests that people were able to use the internet to help organize and to, you know, rally opposition against the government and, you know, the government's now teaching on the edge of collapse. And, you know, it's clear that they were trying to get ahead

of the dissatisfaction and anger in Nepal and a potential for this type of mass protest by blocking those types of services. And there was an understanding, you know, maybe the Nepalese government acted too late, but other governments are kind of wary of this and wary of how the internet might be used against them. James, I guess I'm wondering, what's it for China in doing this? Is exporting this technology just good business, or is there something bigger at play? Yeah, so there are two reasons that China might support this type of export. Both, like you said, it is good business. It is a sector that China has a lot of speciality and experience in,

and it makes sense that you would want to champion your tech companies like that and export them overseas. But it also serves China in a kind of normative sense because it makes the Great Firewall less unusual, it makes censorship around the world more common. That helps China push back at an international level against efforts to kind of protect the free and open internet, to kind of have, you know, various UN or other international rules about how countries can control online content, because it means that China is not alone in wanting to censor the internet or in, you know, actively censoring the internet. And that kind of helps shore up the great firewall

from overseas. So, James, we've mostly been talking about the impact of this expansion on authoritarian governments, but could exporting the Great Firewall impact access to the internet on a global scale? When I started writing about the Great Firewall about a decade ago, this was around the time when this concept known as Cyber Sovereignty was starting to bubble up, and one of the actual kind of progenitors of that idea was Van Bing Xing, is the co-founder of Geige. And Cyber Sovereignty was a kind of theoretical basis for the,

firewall, the idea is that there isn't a free and open, you know, multinational global internet, but a web of national internets and countries can control and limit access within those national internets as they deem fit. And you can control data in the way that you would control people going across a physical border. And that as an idea that at the time was seen as quite alien and definitely anathema to the kind of founding principles of the internet and early internet kind of philosophy. But, has become much more common, both in authoritarian countries and around the world. And one of the reasons it's become more common is because, A, because of China's efforts to export it and to, you know,

get other countries to adopt this kind of approach to the internet, but also just because of the kind of power of the Great Firewall as an example of how you can censor and control the internet. You know, there's this notorious quote from Bill Clinton where he kind of said trying to censor the internet was like nailing jello to a wall. And, you know, China has thoroughly nailed that jello and, you know, and has done for years now. And that served as example to both authoritarian countries, but also democratic governments that if you want to control the internet, you can. You know, internet censorship is difficult and costly, but it's definitely not impossible. And so that has kind of changed how we look at the internet. And we've seen a shift away from a more,

a more utopian vision of the internet as a place away from national borders and a place of, you know, which is really kind of governed by free speech. And, you know, people used to talk about the internet routing around censorship and the idea that this was an impossible thing to do to something where governments assume they can control what people can do and say online. And there is increasing acceptance for their ability and right to do that. So we're talking about China's role in increasing censorship online. But this is not just about Chinese companies, right? Like there are other places that. but sell this technology.

Absolutely. And it's important when we talk about internet censorship that, you know, this is not a Chinese phenomenon. And even within China, it's not a Chinese phenomenon. Western companies help build the great firewall. Western companies kind of led the development of internet censorship and internet surveillance. And what's happened in recent years is those companies, first within China have been replaced by Chinese companies,

by Chinese competitors, out competed and then also kind of shoved aside by the government. and now we're seeing overseas are being replaced by Chinese competitors. And one of the things that's most interesting in the leak is we saw that in Pakistan, where Gide is operating, they actually stepped into the void left by a Canadian company, Sandvine. Yes. So Sandvine was this notorious Canadian security company, which provided similar tools to Gide, you know, firewalls, internet surveillance, things like that. they had long operated in authoritarian countries around the world. There's a lot of attention

brought on their work in Egypt during kind of periods of military rule, to the point that they actually ended up on a U.S. sanctions list last year for, quote, facilitating human rights abuses around the world. And that basically kind of stymied their ability to operate in many countries because of the U.S. limitations. And they, you know, pulled out of a couple dozen places. They have since gone under a kind of collapse and reinvention. They're now, rebranded as app logic and they've said that they focus on servicing democracies and one of the countries they had to pull out of as a result of this kind of scrutiny and outside pressure was Pakistan and you know we saw in the documents that Gidge was ready and willing almost

immediately to step into their shoes to the point that they were actually utilizing existing sandvine installations that Pakistan had around the country and kind of shifting them over to Gij tech and then expanding them and helping Islamabad build out this its own version of a national firewall. Just lastly here, James, of course the issue of online censorship and surveillance have been around for years, but this exportation definitely marks an uptick in this problem. Do we know, is anyone pushing back against it? One of the concerns about the kind of emergence of companies like Gege in recent years

is that it's happening at a time both when governments around the world are increasingly skeptical about kind of free and open internet and our previous vision of the internet and are moving to control what people can do. say online. But also, as, you know, particularly the United States, is retreating from an area that it has played a really important role in the past, which is anti-censorship work. You know, the US was a massive funder of anti-censorship tools and of research into this area. And since President Donald Trump came back to power and there's been massive cuts to aid and oversee spending and, you know, slashes at the State Department, we've seen a lot of money that

previously went to anti-censorship tools and anti-censorship research be frozen or just. just cut completely. And that is going to have a devastating impact on this sector. And it's going to make the kind of fight against censorship, which is already quite one-sided, because you have, you know, a handful of NGOs and private companies against, you know, massive state budgets and particularly, you know, China, which is obviously a huge spender in this area and, you know, one of the richest countries in the world. That was already, you know, outsized, difficult conflict, David versus Goliath. And now David is having far less funding. and quite a lot of those companies and organizations may not be able to survive.

James, always great to have you on their show. Thanks again for joining us. Thanks for having me. That was James Griffiths, the Globe's Asia correspondent based in Hong Kong. And just a quick note here, Gij Networks did not respond to a detailed list of questions about findings in James' reporting or by the Globe's publishing partners. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cyberspace Administration of China

also do not respond. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.