最狠VPN翻墙新规落地：千亿审查系统对决民间极客，未来我们还能翻墙吗？ 20260508【新闻大写】

April 28, 2026 KuaLian, a VPN used by many people posted an announcement on its own X account Let me read it to you We are very sorry to announce a difficult decision We have to terminate operations serving mainland China In the past 20 days the technical team has been trying and adjusting almost every hour Unfortunately it has been confirmed that the connection issues cannot be effectively resolved Translated into plain words

Brothers sorry the wall has gotten taller again In the past 20 days our technical team has been trying and adjusting almost every hour but we just couldn’t withstand how strong the wall on China’s side is KuaLian has been around for 7 years its slogan hasn’t changed in 7 years Always able to connect a VPN that carved the word “always” into its brand admitted defeat in late spring of 2026

It wasn’t the only one that fell during this period That week, among the well-known circumvention tools in China every few days another batch disappeared While killing the chicken, they also started making an example of it A man surnamed Xu in Ezhou, Hubei watched a few TikTok videos on his phone on his sofa and was summoned by the police station three days later After questioning, he was fined 200 yuan

The reason was establishing and using unauthorized channels for international networking A college student in Beijing logged into Microsoft Teams and received a verification code sent from overseas The next day, the police called him opening with a warning from the anti-fraud system You have downloaded overseas fraud software When he was brought into the station every app on his phone every transaction record on his bank card was photographed one by one

In fact, similar actions have happened many times before but this time the scale seems different You opened my video to watch this program I guess you care most about two questions Will this wave pass From this moment on, is it really impossible to get out anymore In today’s episode Gousheng will explain this wall to you how it grew from a line of code into an engineering project who makes a living from it behind the scenes

how powerful it is how the Chinese authorities keep strengthening the wall and how people keep trying to get around it After listening, you can judge for yourself what stage this confrontation has reached and how this 2026 “internet cleanup storm” will end This episode is co-written by me and someone who wishes to remain anonymous but is an extremely skilled expert No ads throughout, just essential knowledge for bypassing the wall worth having Let’s begin

Boss, I beg you for something I stop investigating VPNs okay I’ve lived for over 30 years I’ve watched News Broadcast since I was a kid Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily for more than 20 years It made my brain numb, turned me almost dull Now I finally have a VPN so I can watch Wang Ju’s program

and you insist VPNs are illegal Do you think I don’t know whether it’s illegal I’m just bypassing the wall I didn’t even pay for a membership for them Who can resist not watching them Can you guarantee you never bypass the wall We just want to watch something real and grow our minds What did we do wrong You’re drunk You say there’s nothing wrong with watching them

Would it be better if I said I bypass the wall to watch porn In 1998, Jiang Zemin was 72 the number of Chinese internet users grew from hundreds of thousands in 1996 to over one million within two years This number seems insignificant today but in Zhongnanhai’s eyes it was a bomb that could grow on its own Information began bypassing People’s Daily and CCTV flowing freely through invisible network cables

Almost no one inside the system understood it at the time and not understanding made it more frightening So in 1998, the top leadership launched two projects simultaneously one internal one external The internal one was called the Golden Shield Project led by Luo Gan, then Secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission The goal of Golden Shield can be summed up in one sentence to build a digital central archive building for Chinese police

putting the ID cards of over one billion people nationwide household registration, entry and exit records, vehicle registrations, criminal records and surveillance footage all into digitized, networked, searchable databases It was approved in 1998 and put into operation in 2003 By 2002, the budget had already spent 800 million US dollars The external one had no official code name We all call it the Great Firewall In English, it is called the Great Firewall abbreviated as GFW

Golden Shield put China’s population into databases The Great Firewall kept foreign information outside the country’s borders One was an internal central archive room the other was an information customs post on the border The former allowed the police to see every Chinese person The latter prevented Chinese people from seeing the outside world one in the open, one in the dark They set off together in 1998 and have worked together to this day

What we are talking about in this episode is the latter The person responsible for developing this wall was named Fang Binxing born in Harbin, Heilongjiang in 1960 His father was a teacher at Harbin Institute of Technology He himself also held a PhD in computer science from HIT In 1999, he was transferred to the National Computer Network and Information Security Management Center The next year, he was promoted to deputy chief engineer

One year later, he became chief engineer and director An ordinary engineer took a helicopter ride up inside the system At that time, the wall had just been erected and had not grown teeth yet It only knew four moves Let’s compare the wall to a mailman delivering letters Its first move was called IP blocking Whichever server you wanted to access the wall would write down that address and throw away all requests sent there

It was like everyone on that street could no longer receive your letters The second move was called DNS pollution You ask the wall where Google.com is The wall does not tell you the real address It points you to a public toilet It is like asking the mailman where Wang Ju lives and the mailman randomly points you toward Zhongnanhai The third move was called keyword blocking If the URL you visited contained certain words

the wall would immediately cut it off, like a mailman reading the words on your envelope and throwing the letter away once he found sensitive terms The fourth move was called TCP reset When the wall saw a sensitive packet it forged a signal saying the other side wanted to break up then forged another signal saying you wanted to break up and sent them back to both sides separately Both sides thought the other had dumped them

The four moves above were everything the first-generation wall had mainly targeting a small number of overseas news websites Actually, not many people really wanted to bypass the wall back then People doing foreign trade, overseas students, adult-site viewers, US stock buyers these people could open sites instantly with any VPN costing 10 yuan a month There were dedicated web proxy pages and it was very easy to bypass the wall

For the whole first half, the wall side did not really exert much effort mainly because there was not much traffic In the late 1990s the total number of internet users in China was only a few million altogether But as time went on China’s number of internet users quickly rose to 300 million in 2009 On the evening of July 5, 2009 a serious violent riot broke out on the streets of Urumqi shocking China and the world

Nearly 200 people died Late the next night, the Urumqi Party Secretary announced that the entire city’s internet would be cut off During the July 5 incident because domestic media collectively went silent Twitter and Facebook became the hubs for first-hand information from the scene On the afternoon of July 7, Twitter was blocked across all of China At 8 p.m. that night, Facebook lost connection at major nodes in mainland China

This internet shutdown in Xinjiang lasted a full ten months and was not fully restored until May 14, 2010 It was the longest single internet shutdown in the history of China’s internet The series of events that happened that year made Beijing fully understand the danger of social networks Domestic portals could delete articles, forums could ban accounts But Facebook, Twitter, YouTube these overseas platforms did not listen to them at all Since they could not control your servers

they might as well cover the eyes and ears of everyone inside the country So 2009 became a watershed when Chinese internet users completely said goodbye to the global village Besides Twitter and Facebook falling one after another in July as early as March that year, because of several videos involving Tibet the YouTube you are watching now was cut off without any surprise Then Blogspot and WordPress

these open-source blog platforms that carried the souls of early independent thinkers and recorders were also all implicated and blocked across the entire internet Back then, even their own people inside China were not spared Fanfou, the hottest microblog in China at the time the website founded by Wang Xing, who later created Meituan simply because it failed to keep up with the regulators during July 5

with the speed required for maintaining stability by deleting sensitive information in real time its servers were directly unplugged by force It was in that very year that the underlying logic of the Great Firewall underwent a fundamental mutation The previous logic was that if I discovered sensitive words from you I would then filter you without blocking websites on a large scale But after 2009, the logic became as long as you are not under my absolute control

I will completely block you The old interconnected world was severed with one stroke A carefully trimmed massive intranet surrounded by high walls rose from the ground From that moment on inside and outside the wall officially split into two disconnected parallel universes People born after 2000 probably cannot imagine that Zhang Gousheng, born in the 90s, once had days of accessing YouTube from inside the wall It was also from this year onward

that this side of the wall and the other side officially began the first round of their boxing match The first move thrown by ordinary people was called the Hosts file To put it plainly, it was an underground address book Remember that mailman from before You ask him where Wang Ju lives and he lies with a straight face that he lives in Zhongnanhai What the HOSTS file does

can be summed up in one sentence: you stop asking the mailman Your computer carries its own little booklet in black and white Wang Ju’s house is located at From then on, no matter how the mailman twists black into white he can no longer fool you The wall quickly discovered this trick and began blocking the real addresses on a large scale The HOSTS file no longer worked The cat-and-mouse game was forced to evolve to the next stage

Parasitizing giants Now let us introduce the tool once worshipped like a god: GoAgent Its creator was a Chinese engineer named Phus Lu The logic behind GoAgent was extremely clever It did not confront the wall head-on It exploited the wool of imperialism Although Google withdrew from the Chinese market in 2010 its cloud servers were not completely blocked by the wall Smart Chinese netizens quietly built countless private relay points on Google’s cloud servers

When you wanted to watch banned videos outside the wall you did not directly crash into the firewall you sent a command to Google Hey, help me fetch that video In the eyes of the wall it only saw an ordinary Chinese netizen and a legitimate Google server conducting normal commercial data exchange Thousands upon thousands of Chinese netizens were like soldiers hiding inside the belly of a giant Trojan horse smuggling information right under the wall’s nose

This logic continued to be used in later circumvention products But later, as multinational corporations began massively signing local compliance agreements Google’s entire IP range was wiped out in mainland China This time there was no recovery So GoAgent’s host was strangled overnight At that time, people’s resentment toward the wall was quite strong and they dared to act on it On the morning of May 19, 2011 someone posted a message on Twitter

saying Fang Binxing would appear at Wuhan University’s School of Computer Science that afternoon As soon as the news spread Twitter users immediately launched an event called “Throw Something at Principal Fang to Save China’s Internet” Netizens paid out of their own pockets to add items into the bounty pool At first it was 10 VPN accounts later came cash rewards buffets at five-star hotels in Hong Kong designer clothing and free accommodations

There was even an anonymous company boss offering “If something happens to you, my company has a position for you” A little after 2 p.m.

outside the Wuhan University Computer Science building a student with the online name Han Junyi arrived at the scene early He was a student from Huazhong University of Science and Technology He took off his shoe and loosened the heel ready to throw it at any moment Beside him were two Wuhan University students holding eggs in their hands Originally, those two planned to throw them But as soon as Fang Binxing’s car stopped

a fat professor stepped out alongside him One of the Wuhan University students looked up and saw Oh no that fat professor was actually his thesis advisor who still held his graduation certificate in his hands The student chickened out on the spot But he reacted quickly and casually stuffed the egg into Han Junyi’s hand Han Junyi immediately got the hint He walked toward Fang Binxing and flung the egg at him

It missed, and everyone turned to look at him Taking advantage of that instant he grabbed the shoe by his foot and threw it at Fang Binxing’s chest The first shoe hit him When the second shoe was thrown it was already blocked by a man and a woman beside Fang Binxing Han Junyi had no shoes on and took off running A fat accompanying teacher chased after him asking what he was doing

Han Junyi turned back and cursed, “A bunch of dog slaves” That night, Fang Binxing changed his flight shortened his trip, and flew back to Beijing The next day, the incident blew up More than 7,000 websites reposted it overnight The propaganda system urgently ordered the articles deleted but it was already too late Under Fang Binxing’s Weibo over 100,000 comments flooded in The most-liked one was: Wishing you a speedy recovery Please accept my other shoe

This was the first time in the history of China’s internet that citizens directly, publicly, and face to face questioned a wall-builder It was that Do you feel regret now Now, anyway, I do regret it quite a bit because it was actually a moment of impulse At the time, I didn’t think that much, yes Because actually I saw everyone throwing things at the time

and I had just bought vegetables and fruit and stuff So did you throw because you saw them throwing or had you already planned to go over and throw something Actually, originally there was also a bit of but mainly it was impulse Then have you thought about how the shoe-thrower was not locked up but why you were locked up Exactly, that is why I think it is unfair

There is something shady going on, I only threw some fruit We happen to have a video from that time Go hurry Drive faster, go to the hospital At that time, other people only threw eggs or at most threw a shoe Why did you throw a durian By the end of 2011, the wall completed its first major hardware expansion Its computing power was upgraded This expansion introduced something that terrified all wall-bypassers Deep packet inspection, abbreviated as DPI

Before, the wall at most checked whether your envelope had a contraband label and looked at the shape and weight of your box What is deep packet inspection It is customs opening your entire box and flipping through every piece of clothing like a pervert The wall started opening letters It could directly read the contents of your network packets Once it saw sensitive words or found your packet shape looked like a wall-bypassing software signature

it would not even give a warning and would forge two breakup letters within milliseconds As GoAgent became harder and harder to use even everyone realized the old era was over In 2012, a new repository appeared on GitHub The repository was called shadowsocks Its author was called clowwindy Later, scattered information pieced together that this was code written in his spare time by an ordinary engineer at an internet company in Shanghai just for fun

He had no grand narrative nor was he a dissident He was just an engineer who wrote a small tool to solve his own problem But this small tool precisely hit the wall’s weak spot The design of shadowsocks was to disguise proxy traffic as completely random noise so the wall could not recognize it at all Let me give an analogy The previous wall was a pervert who loved opening letters clowwindy said

Fine, I will take the words written in the letter and scatter them into a pile of patternless symbols Let’s see how you recognize them shadowsocks spread through geek circles like a spark catching fire By 2015, an internal study from Tsinghua University showed that among 371 surveyed Tsinghua teachers and students 21% were using shadowsocks to bypass the wall But the explosion of shadowsocks also made the wall notice it On August 20, 2015 the police came to clowwindy

Then he posted a passage on GitHub: Two days ago the police came to me and told me to stop this project Today they asked me to delete all the code on GitHub I have no choice but to comply I hope that one day I can live in a country where whatever code I want to write I can write that code without having to be afraid I believe you will definitely take my code and build something better

Within hours after this passage was posted the shadowsocks project rushed to number one on GitHub’s global trending list Developers from all over the world flooded into the project homepage and left stars But the logic of the open-source community is very simple Once code is open-sourced it is like scattering sparks into the wind You can catch the lighter but you cannot catch the flames Although clowwindy fell silent the protocol he wrote survived After shadowsocks

it continued to be maintained and iterated by developers around the world and became the infrastructure for an entire generation of wall-bypassing tools The Shadowrocket app you use on your iPhone today is built on this foundation underneath When clowwindy deleted the repository what was the wall busy doing It was redesigning the rules of the game So who exactly manages this wall Before 2014, it was still a bit chaotic

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology managed the pipelines The Ministry of Public Security handled arrests The State Council Information Office managed content The Ministry of Culture managed films and television, and the broadcasting authority managed video websites Which department a matter got stuck in depended on mood and political playacting That is why for so many years in the past VPNs could operate semi-openly in China It was not that no one wanted to regulate them

It was that no one knew who should regulate them After Pingping came to power, he did one thing He settled this account clearly In February 2014 the Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization was established with himself as the group leader This was the first time in CCP history that the top leader personally managed the internet, with an office under it which later became the Cyberspace Administration of China everyone knows

The first director who truly held power was named Lu Wei Coincidentally, like Fang Binxing Lu Wei was also born in 1960, from Chaohu, Anhui He came out of the Xinhua News Agency system served as deputy head of Xinhua News Agency and later became head of the Beijing Municipal Propaganda Department In December 2014 Lu Wei visited the United States as director of China’s Cyberspace Administration He sat in Zuckerberg’s chair at Facebook headquarters for a photo

On Zuckerberg’s desk was a copy of Wang Ju’s oh no, Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China Zuckerberg told Lu Wei I also bought this book for my colleagues so they can understand socialism with Chinese characteristics In September 2015 Xi Jinping visited the United States In the group photo at Microsoft’s campus in Seattle Xi Jinping, Zuckerberg, Cook, and Lu Wei stood side by side That was the highlight moment of Lu Wei’s life Time magazine

also named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2015 That World Internet Conference in Wuzhen was his creation On December 16, 2015 at the second World Internet Conference in Wuzhen Xi Jinping for the first time fully put forward the theory of cyber sovereignty He said every country has the right within its own territory to decide what its internet should look like

and that the United States should not use the banner of freedom and openness to interfere with others The theory had been laid out Next came legal implementation On January 22, 2017 the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Notice on Cleaning Up and Regulating the Internet Network Access Service Market known in the industry as Document No. 32

The document was not long but there was one sentence that from that day onward determined the fate of every wall-bypassing business Without approval from the telecommunications authority no one may independently establish or lease dedicated lines including VPN and other channels to conduct cross-border business activities VPNs without approval from that moment on were officially branded in legal terms as unauthorized operations So who were the approved channels left for

They were left for China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom Only the international business subsidiaries of these three companies were qualified to apply to MIIT for so-called international communications gateway licenses and lease cross-border dedicated lines to multinational companies A German car factory in Shanghai spends enough money on this channel every year to buy several Mercedes-Benz cars Document No. 32 was not a ban

Document No. 32 was not a ban It was an agreement for issuing franchise licenses The wall does not eliminate wall-bypassing It only turns wall-bypassing into a franchise operation On the surface, foreign trade companies pay huge sums to rent international dedicated lines from the three major operators They can bypass the wall But ordinary people cannot afford to rent them so they cannot bypass the wall So where do the channels we use to bypass the wall come from

The three major operators, at the provincial municipal, and even county levels all have their own international dedicated-line distribution agents These agents break up large amounts of bandwidth and sell them to small and medium-sized ISPs Small and medium-sized ISPs then break them up and sell them to IDC server rooms IDCs then break them up and sell them to some small companies supposedly doing enterprise services Each hand they pass through raises the price

but also loosens another layer of control In the end, a considerable portion of this resold bandwidth became the servers of micro-subscription proxy operators That is why over the past 10 years China’s micro-subscription market could grow so large Its underlying bandwidth originally leaked out from the distribution networks of the three major operators, who long turned a blind eye to the gray business underneath After that, on June 1, 2017 the Cybersecurity Law officially took effect

On the morning of July 29 Apple’s China App Store began removing VPN apps on a large scale Overnight hundreds of wall-bypassing tools that had been listed for years disappeared The rules of the game were set The stage was built Then the brightest man at center stage fell by himself In June 2016 Lu Wei was suddenly removed as director of the Cyberspace Administration A man who, 48 months earlier had met Silicon Valley bosses one by one

exited from center stage More than a year later on November 21, 2017 Lu Wei was officially announced to be suspected of serious disciplinary violations This was less than two weeks before the opening of the fourth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen which he had personally created The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection clearly chose this timing deliberately The CCDI notice said he deceived the central leadership used power for personal gain used power for sex

was extremely disloyal to the Party Central Committee and also said he was a two-faced person In the Xi era “two-faced person” has a specific meaning in anti-corruption discourse supporting the central leadership to its face while doing something else behind its back Simply put, it means betraying the top leader Lu Wei was ultimately found to have taken 32 million yuan in bribes He was sentenced to 14 years On March 26, 2019

the Ningbo Intermediate Court delivered the verdict He said he would not appeal His successor was Xu Lin an old subordinate of Xi Jinping from his time in Zhejiang Two years later Xu Lin was transferred to become director of the State Council Information Office Zhuang Rongwen took over He was also an old subordinate of Xi Jinping from his time in Fujian Both successors were core insiders In 2018, a company called Jizhi Information

was registered and established in Haikou Its chief scientist was Fang Binxing our old friend the same Fang Binxing who was hit by a shoe in 2011 and fled the scene in panic Back then, he was still Wall-Builder 1.0 just a state engineer working on state projects inside state organs, but after 2018 Fang Binxing had upgraded to version 2.0 He went into business turning the wall into a product turning the product into a business

turning the business into an export His flagship product was called the Tiangou Security Gateway a mini Great Wall sold around the world Hainan is a free trade port It is the only policy opening in China that allows national-level technical experts to hold shares through commercial companies Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering cannot directly become shareholders inside the state-owned system but in Hainan, they can China’s most important wall-bypassing network control technology from that year onward

was placed into the balance sheet of a private company And this company’s next clients were not just the central government because local warlords also began building their own little walls The central wall has to take foreign trade into account has to take scientific research into account and has to take the compliance dedicated lines of multinational companies into account so it acts with some restraint But provinces are different Public materials show

the earliest local wall was in Chongqing when Bo Xilai was governing Chongqing and the police chief was Wang Lijun Chongqing built a system covering telecommunications and data surveillance across the whole city Its scale and technical level far exceeded the resources a prefecture-level city police system could reasonably mobilize One of the technical advisers for this system according to The New York Times, was Fang Binxing Around 2020 the wall learned to identify abnormal traffic

It could see what your traffic looked like its length and rhythm If it thought this connection was suspicious it would actively probe it to confirm By 2023 the top international security conference USENIX Security published a paper analyzing how the wall detects and blocks fully encrypted traffic Starting in November 2021 the wall upgraded its methods specifically targeting traffic that was entirely encrypted gibberish This move was extremely ruthless

An entire generation of circumvention protocols, shadowsocks, VMess and the older generation of Trojan died on the spot in 2022 and 2023 But the open-source community’s answer wrote the most beautiful chapter of the past decade In early 2023 an anonymous developer with the GitHub ID rprx open-sourced a new protocol called VLESS-REALITY Its core idea had already leapt from cryptography to something called network steganography Steganography means hiding secret information

inside a family letter that looks completely normal From the envelope to the content from the stamp to the handwriting it gives the censor nothing to nitpick REALITY really forwards your TLS handshake to a real high-reputation website such as Apple such as Microsoft When the censor actively probes it what it sees is a real Microsoft certificate and a real Microsoft response, so blocking this kind of connection would be equivalent to blocking that real website itself

If it blocks it Office used by multinational companies nationwide all collapses If it does not block it REALITY walks through swaggering openly So what can the wall do It turns to a more hidden layer It gives up looking at what you say and only looks at the rhythm of how you speak In theory browsing an information website and watching a 4K video have different rhythms The former is a few small bursts

the latter is continuous large chunks It does not need to look at the content just the rhythm is enough to guess with near certainty But the community’s countermeasure arrived almost at the same time Developers randomly inserted padding data at the transport layer fragmenting and scrambling video streams so that in macro-level statistics they looked no different from ordinary web browsing The wall spends huge sums of money training an AI detection model for three months

and just as it learns to identify one rhythm the circumvention side makes the next code commit on GitHub and the parameters are reshuffled At this point you might think the people have won this front Actually no The accuracy of signature recognition has never been low If this wall really decided to be ruthless it is not that it has no way to exterminate wall-bypassing If it keeps tightening the screw all traffic that looks like an encrypted proxy

could simply be cut off first Technically, it can be done but it does not dare to do this The reason is simple With cross-border traffic on the scale of hundreds of billions even if AI misjudges only 1% what falls is not just a few wall-bypassing users If the wall really blocks to the end the first ones who can be chosen are not the wall-bypassers but those doing foreign trade those doing scientific research and those in finance

Today, the handshake signature of a V2Ray traffic flow and data transmitted through a compliant dedicated line with Microsoft Azure look almost exactly the same Of course you can judge with over 90% certainty that it may be wall-bypassing traffic but blocking one hurts a whole batch As long as China still has to do dollar clearing with the world pull code from GitHub and receive an email from a foreign trade client the AI on the wall’s side

will forever have to dance in shackles This is why even today the wall still cannot truly zero out wall-bypassing On September 11, 2025 an anonymous hacker group called Enlace Hacktivista dumped an internal archive of almost 600GB onto the public internet The files came from Fang Binxing’s company, Jizhi This was the largest internal leak in the history of China’s firewall So what exactly was inside those 600 gigabytes

First, it was the source code of an entire commercial product suite the Tiangou Security Gateway which can be deployed at national-level operators can perform deep packet inspection on nationwide traffic can identify and block VPNs and wall-bypassing tools can throttle speeds can track and tag individual users in real time and can inject malicious code into users’ browsers Through this portion of the archive it is now proven that this wall is being exported

InterSecLab made a report on this with the full title The Internet Coup It said this Chinese company is packaging its entire censorship capability and selling it to foreign authoritarian governments Kazakhstan starting in 2018 deployed this architecture in its national center plus 17 cities After Myanmar’s military junta coup in 2021 it was deployed in 26 data centers Myanmar’s 74 precise internet shutdowns in 2024 were done by it

Fang Binxing’s company lets authoritarian governments use it right out of the box without needing to spend 20 years on trial and error themselves Buy it, plug it in and they have a digital Berlin Wall This archive also proved one thing that China has never publicly acknowledged which is that the provincial walls I mentioned above are growing out From December 26, 2023 to March 31, 2025 the Henan wall cumulatively blocked about 4.2 million domains

nearly six times the national Great Wall In certain observation windows the Henan wall once reached ten times the national wall It would even cut off entire second-level domain suffixes in one stroke Your company happened to buy an Australian domain for foreign trade sorry, it cannot be opened in Zhengzhou This kind of crude method would not be used by the national-level wall because the state has to calculate foreign trade accounts but provinces do not care that much

The Henan wall really is blocking things wildly The data shows over 35% were economic business computer and internet information categories rather than the political and news categories emphasized by the national firewall. Starting in April 2022 Yuzhou Shangcai Zhecheng and four village banks in Kaifeng successively blew up About 400,000 depositors had 40 billion yuan frozen Depositors went to Beijing to defend their rights but when they scanned their health codes, they were red

Thousands of people were trapped at home and could not get out In the early morning of July 10 thousands of people rushed to the Henan branch of the People’s Bank of China in Zhengzhou to protest The deployment time of the provincial wall happened to begin in August 2023 This is not only happening in Henan Jiangsu also has a provincial wall focused on anti-fraud which corresponds to the story mentioned at the beginning in April 2026

about that student in Beijing who was summoned just for receiving a Microsoft Teams verification code Jiangsu’s anti-fraud system has already automatically identified receiving verification codes from overseas platforms as high-risk behavior The central government sets the main line, and local governments add their own extra weight on top of it Henan adds one layer Xinjiang adds two layers Fujian adds half a layer Every province has its own unique wall height

What keeps the wall’s side up at night the most is that these 600 gigabytes contain complete source code Now a group of anonymous developers on GitHub are reading Tiangou’s code line by line looking for its decision logic looking for its fallback rules looking for its blind spots The Central Cyberspace Affairs Leading Group was established in 2014 Document No. 32 came in 2017

Document No. 32 came in 2017 Fang Binxing went into business in 2018 600 gigabytes were leaked in September 2025 The major revision of the Cybersecurity Law took effect on January 1, 2026 On January 31, 2026 the draft Cybercrime Prevention and Control Law was released for public comment This entire chain of legal and technical groundwork spanning more than a decade finally pulled the trigger last month The new Cybersecurity Law raised fines for operators

from a cap of 100,000 to 2 million For critical information infrastructure operators the maximum fine is 10 million For directly responsible supervisors as individuals the fine rose from 50,000 to 1 million and overseas jurisdiction was expanded to any overseas activity that harms China’s cybersecurity They can freeze your assets They can sanction you And there is Article 44 of the draft Cybercrime Prevention and Control Law which directly prohibits the production

sale, or provision of any tools used for bypassing the wall and obtaining blocked information from overseas This is the first time providers of wall-bypassing tools have been explicitly written into the criminal law level Let us also sort out last month’s timeline On April 7, the Information and Communications Administration Bureau of MIIT held a closed-door meeting at Xidan Di 103 The topic was strengthening management of unauthorized cross-border data dedicated lines The guests at the table were

China Telecom China Mobile and China Unicom On April 8, an internal notice from Shaanxi Telecom leaked All IPs must be blocked from accessing addresses outside mainland China It is strictly forbidden to carry any wall-bypassing business Violating carriers will be shut down immediately with no refunds and no compensation and no data retained This wording is harsher than any version in the past 10 years On April 16, National Defense Times published an article

titled “You Are Breaking the Law by Bypassing the Wall and Breaking the Net” This kind of semi-official military newspaper tone is the final warning before action The article linked it to espionage and the crime of illegally obtaining state secrets On April 22, the three major operators quietly shut down international roaming services for a batch of users On April 28 KuaLian fell So after this storm has the wall really won For companies of KuaLian’s scale

the state will definitely find a way to deal with them In front of a national-level censorship machine the bigger you are the brighter you shine on the radar It is not just some AI algorithm detecting and clearing things It is also an extremely labor-intensive even clumsy spy war Do you think behind the wall there is only cold machine code No no no Behind the wall is a group of specialized censors Their daily work

is to take funding and disguise themselves as ordinary netizens to buy the hottest VPN packages on the market They not only extract all the server IP lists but also specifically study the VPN providers’ algorithms and reverse-engineer them deeply analyzing their original encryption protocols and traffic signatures Once they figure out your hand it becomes a one-sided slaughter The GFW only needs to enter these collected signatures into the system

and the connections of massive numbers of users will be cut off instantly When traffic grows huge to a certain point what it confronts is no longer just a simple algorithm but a national-level human intelligence and censorship network Being wiped out all at once is really only a matter of time But has the wall really won In the few days after KuaLian’s large-scale disconnection the huge vacuum that appeared in the market did not turn into stagnant water

Many new wall-bypassing apps appeared At the same time more and more ordinary users began moving toward decentralization and turned to learning how to deploy private dedicated nodes It has simply shifted from conventional army positional warfare completely into the jungle warfare of countless guerrilla units Now it has become a structure of protocols tools, and nodes with power divided among three sides The people who write the guns are on GitHub

The people selling the guns are hundreds of anonymous proxy operators The people using the guns are tens of millions of users scattered everywhere The wall took out its strongest weapon and cut down KuaLian and this batch of the biggest gun sellers But the people writing the guns are still on GitHub submitting new versions every week The next day, a new batch of gun sellers appears using overseas virtual machines that cost only a few dollars each

to put ammunition back into users’ hands So the final posture of this internet cleanup storm is killing the chicken to scare the monkeys not pulling the weeds out by the roots It is not that it does not want to uproot them It is that it cannot It can precisely behead KuaLian, which has scale but it cannot declare war on a distributed guerrilla network So the strategy it chooses is to kill one giant chicken

push the price up push the fear up push the threshold up and drive the market back into a niche It also wants wall-bypassing to become once again something that requires technical ability and risk tolerance to pull off so that most ordinary users calculate it in their minds and think, forget it, it is not worth it So is the wall useful or not It is useful, of course it is useful for rule

It changed the default way of obtaining information In a country of 1.4 billion people for the vast majority, when they open their phones in this life the first piece of information they see the thousandth piece and the millionth piece all come from Weibo WeChat Douyin and Toutiao Overseas information from the very beginning simply never appears in most people’s field of vision It has nurtured an entire industrial chain Around this wall there are MIIT, the Cyberspace Administration

the Ministry of Public Security’s security system provincial cyber police brigades private outsourcing companies like Jizhi public opinion monitoring budgets at every university special Clean and Bright funds for every local government and content security officers maintained by every internet company This is an employment line of at least hundreds of thousands of people and an industrial chain worth hundreds of billions It has already formed its own food chain It has shaped a generation’s psychological defaults

Their default setting is that this world is supposed to be like this Those things outside are supposed to be distant Some things just should not be asked This is the wall’s deepest moat and also the wall’s most expensive product The crackdown has been especially strict lately A lot of them have been taken down My channel can only get two units a week now Say no more, bro Give it to me, give it to me

I really cannot take it anymore These past few days have been killing me What did you think I bought Quick, quick, I have been holding it in for days Finally, I can watch it I have rhinitis What did you think the tissues were for Once I get over the wall, of course I watch Wang Ju’s Case Files and News Uppercase What else could I watch Finally, for you who can see this video

here are a few practical suggestions Since you can see this video technically, you have already passed the first hurdle First, do not trust free VPNs Especially do not trust free services whose ads read like health supplement commercials There is no such thing as free cross-border bandwidth and no such thing as free technical maintenance If a free tool is still living especially well it usually means you are not the customer You are the raw material

Your personal information is its business model Second, directly blacklist the so-called big international VPN brands that spend money on ads at the top of search engines In front of today’s Great Wall, rankings mean the more famous and established the brand, the faster it dies When reading reviews, do not look at flashy sponsored articles Only recognize two things: to see whether wall penetration is stable go to GitHub and look for tech geeks

using broadband from China’s three major operators and check the real evening peak speed-test screenshots they fought hard to produce Whether it is a mule or a horse you will know by looking at the internet speed at 8 p.m.

Also see whether it dares to show its cards whether it has paid top international teams such as CURE53, and whether it has done a code audit or can produce an audit report stamped by one of the Big Four accounting firms proving it absolutely does not log user data If a service only shouts permanent stability military-grade encryption optimized specifically for China then it is not a service provider

but more like a fake medicine seller peddling ancestral secret formulas Third, for your most sensitive accounts enable two-factor authentication wherever you should use hardware security keys wherever you should and completely isolate them from wall-bypassing tools wherever you should Do not use the same browser Do not use a mainland Chinese phone number Buy a Google Voice phone number and you can solve the problem of receiving verification codes

The fact that you and I can meet in this episode today is itself a low-probability event Among 1.4 billion people when the vast majority open their phones in this life they swipe through only those few apps and see what the government wants them to know They do not know the wall They do not know Fang Binxing They do not know clowwindy They do not know about those 600GB in September 2025 They live quite coherently

and do not feel they are missing anything This is what is most powerful about this wall It does not just block information It makes the very fact of being blocked disappear from most people’s attention In another 20 years the two sides of the wall may each grow their own internet and understand less and less of what the other is saying And people like us we live in the seam of this rupture We remember 2009

that summer when the internet was cut off for 10 months We remember 2011 that shoe flying toward Fang Binxing’s chest We remember clowwindy’s farewell in August 2015 We remember that 572GB torrent in September 2025 We remember that because we could not speak freely inside the wall we were forced to come to Japan to make this episode for you Remembering this itself is a form of value That is all for today I am Zhang Gousheng

I hope the future you will always have a way to access information from the free world