For overseas researchers, policymakers, businesses and casual users alike, access to China’s public information is quietly shrinking as a growing number of official websites go dark outside the country, a new study has found.
The contraction is far from marginal. A number of Chinese government websites were inaccessible from outside the country, the findings showed, indicating the emergence of a “reverse Great Firewall”.
This suggests a deliberate effort by Beijing to prevent foreign data mining and open-source intelligence gathering, according to research findings published this month.
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The paper, published in the Journal of Cybersecurity on February 5, said geo-blocking practices were “core in this development”.
Such internet filtering restricts access to online content by identifying where a user is located through their internet protocol or IP address and blocking users from certain regions.
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“China’s authorities pioneer geo-blocking in the same way as they pioneered the ‘original’ Great Firewall,” wrote the paper’s author, Vincent Brussee, a PhD candidate at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
