Internet Censorship in The People's Republic of China - Evasion

Evasion

Internet censorship in China is circumvented by determined parties by using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and SSH connections to outside mainland China are not blocked, so users may circumvent all of the censorship and monitoring of the Great Firewall if they have a secure connection method to a computer outside mainland China. However, disruptions of VPN services have been reported. Rupert Murdoch famously proclaimed that advances in communications technology posed an “unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere” and Ai Weiwei argued that the Chinese “leaders must understand it's not possible for them to control the Internet unless they shut it off".

As the Great Firewall of China gets more sophisticated, the users are getting increasingly creative in the ways they elude the censorship such as by using analogies to discuss topics. Furthermore, users are becoming increasingly open in their mockery of them by actively using homophones to avoid censorship. Deleted sites have "been harmonized", indicating President Hu Jintao's Internet censorship under the big picture of creating a "harmonious society". For example, censors are referred to as "river crabs", because in Chinese those two words together form a homophone for "harmony". Since free hosting blog services like Blogger and Wordpress.com frequently face blockage, some China-focused services explicitly offer to change a blog's IP address within 30 minutes if it is blocked by the authorities. In July 2006, researchers at Cambridge University claim to have defeated the firewall by ignoring the TCP reset packets.

The Tor anonymity network was and is subject to blocking by China's Great Firewall. The Tor website is blocked when accessed over HTTP but it is reachable over HTTPS so it is possible for users to download the Tor Browser Bundle. The Tor network maintains a public list of approximately 3000 relays which are almost all blocked. In addition to the public relays, Tor maintains so called bridges which are non-public relays. Their purpose is to help censored users reach the Tor network. The Great Firewall is dynamically blocking these bridges by looking for their TLS fingerprint. According to a research paper published in April 2012, the block can be circumvented by using packet fragmentation or the Tor obfsproxy bundle in combination with private obfsproxy bridges.

It was common in the past to use Google's cache feature to view blocked websites. However, this feature of Google seems to be under some level of blocking, as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites. Currently the block is mostly circumvented by using proxy servers outside the firewall, and is not difficult to carry out for those determined to do so. Some well-known proxy servers have also been blocked. Some Chinese citizens used the Google mirror elgooG after China blocked Google.

Moreover, net surfers come up with many more technical ways to get around with the Great Wall of China. Haystack is "a free proxy-like system that hides the user's traffic inside a continuous stream of innocent-looking requests. It also uses encryption, so people can get at any site without drawing attention to themselves". Steganography is a "practice of embedding useful data in what looks like something irrelevant. The text of a document can be broken into its constituent bytes, which are added to the pixels of an apparently innocent picture. The effect is barely visible on the picture, but the recipient can extract it with the right software".