China to Tighten Control Over Internet Censorship
The Chinese government has become increasingly aggressive in its pursuits to lockdown and control users in China with their great internet firewall. Now, China’s plans to tighten web censorship will continue with a new law coming into effect next month that regulates all content published by foreign companies looking to do business within the country.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, or SCMP, newspaper reported Tuesday that the “Regulation for the Management of Online Publishing Services” will apply to “creative works,” such as games, animation, comics, audio recordings and video.
Starting in March, foreign companies will not be allowed to publish “creative” works online in China without approval from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.
Last year other major VPN providers were entirely blocked in China, as well as numerous proxy services. Despite all of this, the Chinese government has gone so far as to deny that the great firewall exists. It’s not censorship to completely block websites, alter information, or hide information. It’s simply a way of “managing” the Internet they said.
This management would be what the Chinese government wants–a country-wide governmental control, known as “Internet sovereignty”, over the web. The great firewall has been an underground movement from the government, but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s censorship. And they want it to become even more widespread so that they can continue to control what information Chinese citizens can access from various social networking sites, online encyclopedias, or other popular sites like Google.
Traditional VPNs and proxy services use to be reliable for Chinese citizens to access the content that they want. Use of a virtual private network like TorGuard VPN is still an efficient way to not only change an IP address but mask the underlying outgoing traffic as well. However, most VPN providers don’t provide reliable access to China since China has become active in hampering Socks and SSH proxies. It’s estimated that 1-3% of users in China are using VPN services like TorGuard to bypass censorship restrictions–which is around 1 million users. A considerable amount indeed, one that is too much for China.
Despite these impending restrictions and blockades, TorGuard VPN is still the best VPN for China since it has Stealth VPN servers as well as a Shadowsocks proxy that obfuscates internet traffic. TorGuard VPN is also an excellent way to access popular media sites with our new dedicated IP address feature and special media servers. Powerful 256-bit AES encryption, as well as a 2048-bit RSA key, provide a substantial military grade foundation for all future efforts.
