What is the reality of the internet in China, the GFW

AnthonySmith

Ok so we all kind of make a few jokes that we probably should not about the GFW.

But what is life really like in China when using the internet and what would it be like, or what WILL it be like when the AI gets involved and locks shit down faster than users can keep up?

It has always seemed like a cat and mouse game from the outside, but I wonder, from the inside, what are the real risks?

xxx

The Great Firewall is less about making it absolutely impossible for anyone to get around it, and more about maintaining ultimate control over the flow of information across China’s borders. Under normal circumstances, the system can tolerate a certain amount of circumvention, especially when access to the global internet is economically useful or necessary. But if something begins to spread in a way the authorities consider politically sensitive, socially destabilizing, or otherwise threatening, they retain the ability to tighten restrictions quickly.

Nor does the system block the entire internet outside mainland China. In practice, it targets a selected set of major, widely used websites, platforms, and online services based overseas. There are also legal ways to obtain cross-border internet access: Chinese telecom operators offer dedicated international network connections to businesses, although these services are generally available through corporate rather than individual accounts.

And the system does not have to catch every single person using a VPN in order to work. Simply making access to the outside internet require extra knowledge, effort, money, and a willingness to accept some risk is enough to divide users into two very different information environments.

In that sense, the point may not be to seal the border completely. It is to shape what the vast majority of people see by default, while preserving the ability to tighten control when necessary.

tulipyun

If a person has an average IQ, they will be able to bypass the GFW without difficulty.

If they lack this ability, they may indeed need protection from the GFW.

Advin

I went to mainland China recently and roaming SIM cards don't have GFW restrictions, so it didn't really feel like there was even a firewall except when I used hotel Internet. It's really not as locked down as I initially thought.

Mainland China residents who really care about having international access to the Internet likely already have access to high-speed VPNs, it's not like international connectivity is completely severed and my understanding is that high-speed VPNs are fairly easy to access there. I think the idea of GFW is to really just make it more of an inconvenience to access certain major services or websites.

If you think about it, I don't think LES or LET is blocked by GFW (and they both appear in Baidu search). Additionally, a few hosting providers (like us) accept Alipay as a form of payment through Stripe. A person in mainland China would have no issue searching for and purchasing a foreign VPS.

China also has equivalents to common apps that are ran by western companies and has been building their Internet infrastructure over a long period of time. If you can understand Mandarin (the English translations are not so great), they work quite well and I'm not sure there's a substantial practical need for most residents to access everyday foreign services like Google, YouTube, Twitter/X, etc. when alternatives already exist within the country.

For example,

Google = Baidu
YouTube = Bilibili/Douyin
WhatsApp = WeChat
PayPal = AliPay/WeChat Pay
ChatGPT = DeepSeek, Kimi, and others
Google Maps = Amap/Baidu Maps