Beijing’s Censorship Reaches Beyond China’s Borders * The Gateway Pundit * by Antonio Graceffo

China blocks thousands of websites, including major news and social media platforms such as The New York Times, the BBC, YouTube, X, and Facebook. Since 2002, authorities have blocked numerous internet services, including Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Yahoo.

Provincial authorities have also built their own filtering systems on top of the national Great Firewall. Researchers found one in Henan Province that blocked content at a scale reportedly ten times greater than the national system. Censorship rules also extend to mobile apps, including bans on apps focused on minority languages, Bible content, and foreign-language learning.

China’s censorship apparatus is reinforced by the shutdown of private English tutoring centers. Since 2021, the government’s “double reduction” policy has banned for-profit tutoring in core subjects including English, closing firms such as Wall Street English, one of the world’s largest English-language tutoring chains. State schools, meanwhile, largely omit English speaking practice, since it is not tested on the gaokao. Over the same period, China’s ranking on the EF English Proficiency Index has fallen from 38th globally in 2020 to the “low proficiency” tier by 2022, where it has remained since.

A population with weaker English proficiency has less practical ability to read foreign reporting, evade keyword filters, or verify what state media says about the outside world. This compounds the isolation the Great Firewall is designed to enforce.

Beijing’s Great Firewall serves a dual purpose: cutting the population off from information the government has not approved and punishing anyone who tries to get around that barrier. The system’s enforcement power increasingly comes from identity infrastructure, not just blocked URLs. Since 2017, real-name registration has been mandatory for social media, messaging apps, and SIM cards, tying every account to a citizen’s legal identity.

In 2024, the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China rolled out a National Online Identity Authentication app requiring a national ID card and facial recognition to generate a “web number” that can follow a user across platforms. Rights groups, including ARTICLE 19, warn that this consolidates data previously scattered across private platforms into a single system accessible to police.

Separately, China’s blacklist system, not a single “social credit score” as it is often described, but a network of more than 60 sector-specific blacklists run by different agencies, can bar a flagged individual from flights, high-speed rail, and certain jobs. A 2024 UK immigration tribunal ruling found that blacklisting can amount to persecution when it targets protected political or religious expression. For speech offenses specifically, however, the harshest punishment in practice is not administrative but criminal prosecution. Qiao Xinxin’s case shows how the two systems work together: real-name registration and surveillance infrastructure make it possible to identify who is speaking, while charges such as “inciting subversion of state power” make the punishment severe once authorities do.

Qiao Xinxin, legal name Yang Zewei, helped launch the BanGFW Movement in March 2023, calling for the dismantling of China’s censorship system. The BanGFW Movement, also known as the Wall Demolition Movement, drew in a scattered network of Chinese dissidents living abroad, with participants spread across Southeast Asia and settled in North America and Western Europe. Organizers distributed online tutorials teaching Chinese internet users how to circumvent censorship, and Qiao produced a companion guide referred to as the “Wall Demolition Handbook.”

The movement urged supporters to hold placards outside Chinese embassies, contact foreign governments, and reach out to international media. After the campaign gained traction, Chinese police began pressuring Qiao’s relatives in Hunan to persuade him to abandon the effort and return to China.

On May 31, 2023, he disappeared from his home in Vientiane, Laos. Rights groups including RSF say he was seized in a cross-border operation and transferred to China. He surfaced in detention in Hunan, where authorities formally arrested him on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.” He was sentenced, in a closed-door trial, to five years and sent to Chishan Prison in Hunan.

Mistreatment of prisoners held for speech and information offenses in China is documented well beyond Qiao’s case. A 2022 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights found China’s detention and prison system to be characterized by “general violence,” in breach of the international prohibition on torture, barring extradition to China from all 46 Council of Europe member states.

A 2026 Safeguard Defenders survey of 59 former prisoners documented beatings, Taser and pepper-spray use, prolonged stress positions, shackling, and solitary confinement that, in some cases, lasted far longer than the 15-day legal limit set by China’s own Prison Law, a limit that international law treats as the threshold for psychological torture. The same survey found that solitary confinement is an official punishment for inmates who refuse forced labor or fail to meet production quotas.

Taiwanese rights defender Lee Ming-che, who was held in the same Chishan Prison as Qiao, described working 12-hour days during his five-year sentence there. Fellow rights advocate Cheng Yuan was reportedly held in a high-security unit within the prison, where he performed forced labor before being transferred to a unit without it.

In August 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders said she had received “consistent allegations” of torture and denial of medical care affecting imprisoned rights defenders, including individuals held on speech-related charges.

Against that backdrop, activists connected to the BanGFW Movement, including spokesperson Liu Dongling, allege in interviews with The Epoch Times and Kanzhongguo that Qiao has faced similar treatment inside Chishan Prison’s First Ward. They claim he was forced to produce military-style rubber footwear for export to Africa and, after he resisted, was subjected to beatings by fellow inmates, pepper spray, solitary confinement, and restraint straps that bound his arms and legs to a metal bed until he lost control of his bodily functions.

This is how the CCP’s censorship machine works: digital repression outside the cell and physical coercion inside it. The purpose is to silence dissidents and warn others not to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party. By arresting an activist in Laos and transporting him to a closed-door trial in China, the CCP has also shown that it is willing to cross international borders to punish those it deems a threat.