Using VPNs to Access the Internet from China

The next AoIR 2015 session I'm in has only two papers, as one speaker has dropped out at the last minute; the first speaker therefore is Fan Mai, whose focus is on the use of Virtual Private Networks and anonymising proxy servers in China. Some such servers are used especially by expatriates living in China, trying to access western media sites that are otherwise blocked.

Such blocking is part of the Chinese censorship regime, of course, and a range of approaches to circumvention are rife in the country. There are very little hard data on the use of such tools, however, largely because the very tools are designed to protect the anonymity of their users. According to the Berkman Center, some 3% of all Chinese users utilise any circumvention tools – but qualitative interviews with expats in China show that some 90% of that group use circumvention tools.

Why this much higher adoption rate, then? There are three factors: the services are readily available; this group of users is much more aware of their availability; and this group of users also has a much stronger preference for using them.

The availability of proxy servers in mainland China is similarly difficult to assess. Through interviews, Fan has established that VPN services are most popular; their history, target market, costs, number and location of available servers, and linguistic and technical accessibility all affect their popularity. Many currently popular VPNs were established in 2009, when China began to block sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Advertising by these service providers is often explicitly directed at international travellers, and they stress the number and locations of their servers. This explicitly addresses country-based censorship and the geographic shaping of user experiences. By selling such services, of course, Internet freedom and net neutrality becomes privatised – they provide a private solution to the public issue of net neutrality. Much of this is not directly addressing domestic Chinese users at all, then.