China’s tech sector is strong in part because it has nearly unlimited support from the state, as commentators have noted. Another source of innovation is state coercion.
I found this when I researched activist developers who grew up in the shadow of the “Great Firewall,” the state’s technical and legal system for filtering internet access.
Rules and restrictions that are out of sync with social norms taunt, provoke disobedience, maybe even add a sprinkle of delight to it, as it did for many who were frustrated by the firewall. Instead of rolling over, they made ladders to climb it.
A growing number of Chinese software engineers and entrepreneurs have over the past decade come together to develop a new class of censorship-circumvention tools and services that are now reaching millions of consumers in China and in other places with restricted internet access.
A key year was 2011, when the pseudonymous developer Clowwindy — whose profile picture is featured above — created a tool to evade censorship without detection. Shadowsocks, as he called it, works by making VPN traffic — which technicians can easily detect on networks — look like random, unidentifiable internet activity. It’s camouflage.
Another seminal tool, V2Ray, was introduced in 2015. A prominent developer told me it was a “game changer,” because it’s highly adaptable to improvements in the Great Firewall. If a particular kind of camouflage was discovered, people could switch, and make their illegal VPN connections look like video calls, regular web browsing, or something else.
Both tools still work today, and many others like them have followed. They work so well that Google decided to use Shadowsocks in its own VPN service, Outline, which the company promoted during protests in Iran in 2022.
The continued success of China’s firewall-climbers is less about individual creativity and more about how developers have maintained an active innovation community that can dispassionately fix software problems and work on improvements, despite the need to remain anonymous or pseudonymous. Despite the risks involved, they can communicate and collaborate openly, thanks to encrypted chat services like Telegram and Signal, and global platforms for code-sharing like GitHub.
GitHub data shows that development of Chinese censorship-circumvention tech is growing. In 2013, the number of developers who worked on tools like Shadowsocks was forty-five. In 2023, it was more than a thousand. These measures are flawed, as some users have for security reasons started over with new identities, but the community’s overall productivity has also jumped. The total number of saved code changes — commits in GitHub parlance — has increased more than twentyfold since 2013. The community now offers censorship-circumvention tools for all major operating systems.
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 of their problems have obvious solutions. When disagreements emerge and voting fails to settle them, people sometimes split and pursue different paths, on their own or in small groups.
The community has so far been able to overcome all improvements to the Great Firewall. Some of the maintenance work they do is complex, but much of it is the kind of upkeep that “anyone” who is “quite nerdy” can do, one developer told me. The low bar for making meaningful additions contributes to the community’s growth and therefore also makes it more capable and resilient, because small additions add up, and occasionally, sporadic contributors become committed participants. One developer said she first got involved as a consumer, then discovered “some bugs,” suggested some improvements, and eventually became a “member of the community.”
The community’s censorship-circumventing code is open source, so anyone is free to use it. But most people want a user-friendly program they can run with a click, and many are willing to pay for the convenience.
This demand has given rise to a large black market for firewall-climbing apps and tools, called “airports.”
Airports, so named because the Shadowsocks logo is a paper plane, are small and informally organized VPNs. For instance, someone may have set up their own server and now provides access to friends and acquaintances, and receives payments or thank-yous via messaging platforms such as WeChat.
But many airports are shadowy enterprises. One airport operator, who had at most 2,000 paying customers, told me that he charged 12 yuan a month per user, about $1.50. This was deemed “very affordable” for his clients, but it still generated income for him. He spent two to three hours on the business every day, mostly teaching new clients how to use the service and replacing servers that were discovered and blocked by the Great Firewall. His customer base grew through word of mouth.
How big is the airport market? To find out, my research assistants and I collected data on about 4,000 unique airports that were active during the last five years. We then used each airport’s Telegram subscriber counts, along with leaked member data from four airports, to estimate the ratio of Telegram followers to actual airport users, which helped us size up the market.
Our crude measures suggest that the total user count for black-market airports is more than 90 million. The estimate is conservative — for one, it excludes smartphone apps — but it illustrates that the reach of China’s underground development is quite vast. The cat is well and truly out of the bag.
That airport providers profit from open-source technology does not bother any of the unpaid volunteer developers I spoke to. As two people put it, airport providers create “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.
Several developers told me that their work is not about politics, but practical needs and wants, perhaps annoyance with the limits imposed on them. Their coding amounts to what sociologist Asef Bayat calls a “non-movement,” where state control is undermined not by marches in the streets, but through everyday activities, which in aggregate and over time undermines state legitimacy.
But in quite a twist, the oppressive Internet restrictions might have helped harness homegrown tech talent, which now supports China’s rise as a digital superpower. Many of the developers of anti-censorship software have day jobs at technology companies — including in AI.
Isak Ladegaard is the author of “Open Secrecy, How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld.”
