This English version may have been machine-generated from the Chinese original and may not convey the original meaning accurately.
According to reports, a screenshot of a “VPN circumvention identification intelligence database” allegedly from the Shenzhen-based company Ren Zixing recently surfaced. It lists more than thirty proxy software programs, and the identification files were updated continuously in early July. Although the screenshot’s source and scope of deployment remain to be verified, when considered alongside the company’s publicly disclosed patent for “multi-model fusion VPN traffic identification” and the earlier exposure of related patents held by Fujian Zixun, a clear trajectory of technological evolution has emerged: China’s internet censorship is shifting from “blocking websites” to “identifying traffic,” from disrupting the dissemination of content to flagging the connection behavior itself.
This means that even if you have never clicked on a “sensitive” webpage, you may still be flagged, throttled, or disconnected by the system simply because your connection patterns, packet sizes, or frequency of node changes match certain statistical characteristics, after which your identity can be traced through the real-name information held by your telecom operator. The remarks of technology workers reveal the essence of this system: it does not ask why you circumvent the firewall or what you have viewed; it only asks whether your traffic “looks like” proxy traffic. This is punishment directed at behavior rather than content—the very way you use encryption, switch nodes, and pursue privacy and freedom of connection becomes grounds for suspicion.
It is worth asking: Why would a country invest such sophisticated technological resources in hunting down ordinary people among the 90 million ordinary internet users who look up information, contact relatives and friends overseas, or read blocked news? The answer is not complicated—this system serves not cybersecurity, but information monopoly and thought control. When the government defines “circumventing the firewall” as illegal, it is essentially declaring that citizens have no right to choose independently how to obtain information, while the state monopolizes the authority to determine “what is trustworthy” and “what is visible.”
The reason such censorship technology can be upgraded and iterated without restraint is that there are no effective checks and balances behind it. Companies developing surveillance patents do not need to undergo independent privacy impact assessments; the enforcement boundaries of the public security and cyberspace authorities are not subject to parliamentary oversight; and if citizens are summoned for questioning or fined for “circumventing the firewall,” they cannot seek redress through an independent judiciary—because the courts themselves are appendages of power rather than guardians of rights. The legislative, executive, and judicial powers are consolidated in the hands of a single party, so any expansion of technological surveillance need not answer to the public and is not constrained by questioning or exposure from the news media, because the media itself operates within the same censorship system.
This is precisely where the problem lies: power without checks naturally tends to expand its intrusion into citizens’ lives without limit. Today it is traffic-pattern identification; tomorrow it may be the comprehensive integration of device fingerprinting and behavioral profiling. The technological ceiling is never the endpoint; the only possible boundary must come from institutional constraints outside the realm of power.
What can truly end this endless surveillance arms race is not a stronger circumvention tool, but the establishment of constitutional democracy: the separation of powers would enable the legislature to review the constitutionality of surveillance legislation; an independent judiciary would allow citizens to sue over illegal surveillance and obtain redress; and press freedom would ensure that the development and deployment of such technologies are subject to public oversight rather than quietly iterated in the dark. Only when citizens’ freedom of communication, right to privacy, and right to know are written into the constitution and effectively protected by it, with independent courts and a free media serving as watchdogs, will ordinary people no longer have to live in constant fear simply because they choose a particular way to connect. Technology itself is neither good nor evil, but when power is unchecked, any technology can become a sharp blade for suppressing freedom.
News background: The original report on which this commentary is based can be found at Radio Free Asia Mandarin。