US should fund ways to help Chinese get around ‘Great Firewall’, lawmakers hear
- Washington urged to aid travel from China: ‘Some of the most sophisticated circumvention users in China are those who have spent significant time overseas’
Washington needs to fund censorship circumvention tools for Chinese people while also helping them come to the US to study, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers was told on Tuesday.
Testifying before the House select committee on China, Xiao Qiang, founder of the UC Berkeley-based China Digital Times, a bilingual media organisation, advocated for congressional funding to develop new circumvention technologies and decentralised artificial intelligence tools to help Chinese people overcome Beijing’s “Great Firewall”.
The Great Firewall of China refers to the country’s online censorship system that blocks certain foreign websites and slows down internet traffic as it crosses the border. It’s why mainland Chinese users can’t access Facebook and YouTube or publications including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the South China Morning Post.
“The [Chinese Communist Party] is providing the world with a blueprint for establishing a digital totalitarian state and presenting a real threat to world peace,” Xiao said.
While the US government already funds the provision of traditional circumvention tools like virtual private networks (VPNs) in mainland China, witnesses say such tools are not enough, arguing that Beijing has stepped up criminalisation and imposed other disincentives to prevent people from accessing these tools.
