A recent study has revealed that China’s “Reverse Great Firewall” is taking shape, with over 50% of Chinese government websites now inaccessible from overseas. Analysts believe that this is just one part of China’s “two-way” isolation, as its tactics intensify in parallel with the worsening crisis faced by the Chinese regime in recent years.
For many years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built a national firewall (GFW) for internet censorship and control, effectively turning China into a LAN separated from the global network. The GFW aims to restrict domestic users from accessing the global internet. A new form of “Reverse Great Firewall” is emerging, which uses a logic similar to the original firewall but in reverse, restricting international access to domestic information instead of limiting domestic access to global information.
This “Reverse Great Firewall” utilizes geo-blocking to restrict overseas IP addresses from accessing publicly available data within China. Geo-blocking refers to a mechanism that restricts access to online content based on the IP address of users attempting to access it.
The latest study published on February 5 in the Journal of Cybersecurity by Oxford University Press, authored by Vincent Brussee from Leiden University, not only reveals the current state of technical blocking but also delves deeper into the new logic of “cybersecurity” within the bureaucratic system of the CCP.
Researchers tested 13,508 Chinese government websites using residential proxies from 14 countries globally and found that over 50% of the websites could not be accessed normally from overseas. Approximately 10% of the websites implemented explicit server-side or DNS blockings (such as the websites of the Anhui Provincial Government and the Supreme People’s Court), while around 40% of the access failures were due to timeouts, reflecting infrastructure bottlenecks and restrictions on cross-border traffic.
The article highlights that this form of geo-blocking is not a centralized directive but rather fragmented. Geo-blocking arises from decentralized responses to top-down pressures for network security. Local officials, in response to pressures to prevent “data aggregation” and “open-source intelligence (OSINT)” at higher levels, prefer to “over-implement” by severing external connections to mitigate political risks.
The emergence of geo-blocking from China is predicted to inevitably lead to the fragmentation of the internet information ecosystem. This will make acquiring information concerning regulatory norms and enforcement more challenging for businesses, as well as pose a headache for overseas Chinese citizens and international citizens with stakes in China.
Although the Chinese authorities rarely explicitly mention geo-blocking in their public information sources, cybersecurity may be a significant underlying motivation. Cybersecurity is typically defined as safeguarding information systems from malicious actors and digital attacks. However, the Chinese authorities qualify cybersecurity as the security of the entire regime, encompassing not just hacking and internet surveillance issues but also “information security” and “cultural and ideological security,” which involves questions of online content censorship, such as controlling so-called “rumors,” and cross-border information flow issues.
For instance, a report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2022 was based on open-source information from Chinese government websites, warning of severe signs of crimes against humanity in the Xinjiang region. The Chinese authorities later re-uploaded the data, omitting sensitive segments.
Li Linyi, a China expert, told Da Ji Yuan that in fact, in recent years, Beijing has been implementing “two-way” blockades on what they consider sensitive information. He stated, “I believe this is part of the CCP’s ‘two-way isolation’ strategy, intensifying its tactics in parallel with the worsening crisis faced by the Chinese regime in recent years.”
The official records of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2022 showed that CCP leader Xi Jinping mentioned “security” as many as 68 times, a significant increase from 43 times in 2017.
Reports in 2025 indicated the emergence of localized internet censorship systems in China, in addition to the national Great Firewall (GFW), with these regional systems, known as the “wall within a wall,” being stricter than the GFW.
Since around 2022, Chinese authorities have gradually reduced the disclosure of sensitive data, especially unfavorable economic data such as land sales, forex reserves, bond trading, and more. Access to various platforms like Qichacha, CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure), Wind, significant company databases, academic databases, and financial service providers, has been curtailed for foreign users.
The number of cremated remains can serve as a reference to observe the number of deaths related to Covid-19 (the CCP virus), but leaks have been tightened since partial leaks in 2023. The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the CCP has not released the fourth-quarter cremation data for 2022 that could reveal large-scale infections caused by the relaxation of epidemic control measures. Such death data has always been a regime secret in Chinese history.
On January 31, the Cybersecurity Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security of the CCP issued a solicitation draft of the “Network Crime Prevention and Control Law,” which not only targets Chinese citizens but also emphasizes blocking free information originating from abroad, explicitly prohibiting individuals and organizations from providing any technical support, such as VPNs, to help others access blocked overseas information.
Lai Rongwei, Executive Director of the Taiwan Inspiration Association (TIA), previously analyzed for Da Ji Yuan that the CCP regime has become increasingly closed off since Xi Jinping took office, with its isolation having two directions. One is towards foreigners, aiming to prevent genuine information about China from being taken away, and the other is internally, to prevent the Chinese people from having the right to information. In the past, after China integrated with the world, there was a slightly more open flow of information, but now the country is retracing its steps backward.