China’s tech sector is strong due to its unlimited support from the state and state coercion. Over the past decade, Chinese software engineers and entrepreneurs have developed censorship-circumvention tools and services that are now reaching millions of consumers in China and other places with restricted internet access. A key year was 2011, when pseudonymous developer Clowwindy created Shadowsocks, a tool to evade censorship without detection. V2Ray, introduced in 2015, is highly adaptable to improvements in the Great Firewall and allows people to switch between illegal VPN connections and regular web browsing.
The continued success of China’s firewall-climbers is less about individual creativity but more about maintaining an active innovation community that can dispassionately fix software problems and work on improvements, despite the need to remain anonymous or pseudonymous. Developers can communicate and collaborate openly, thanks to encrypted chat services like Telegram and Signal, and global platforms for code-sharing like GitHub.
China’s underground developers discuss their work in private and public chat rooms and make decisions through deliberation. They often reach consensus quickly, as many problems have obvious solutions. The community has so far been able to overcome all improvements to the Great Firewall, making it more capable and resilient.
A large black market for firewall-climbing apps and tools, called “airports,” has emerged, with airport providers creating easy-to-use and cost-effective ways to help more people cross the Great Firewall. Enabling users to access the open Internet on a consistent basis, at scale is a major logistical undertaking that a voluntaristic community is poorly equipped to handle, but the market gets the job done.
