One of politics’ most stubborn axioms is the law of unintended consequences. Information is too myopic, populations too vast, and problems too complex for simple solutions to seamlessly translate from theory to practice. This dynamic often produces results that surprise, frustrate, and sometimes embarrass officials. Consider the experience of Fang Binxing nine years ago. The widely regarded “father” of China’s “Great Firewall”—the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) network of internet censorship and surveillance—was forced to use a virtual private network during a public lecture to access a website in South Korea that his own creation deemed a national security threat. Chinese netizens reveled in the irony. “Blocked by his own system… This is just too hilarious,” one wrote on social media. Another mocked Fang for being so committed to the Great Firewall that he didn’t leave a back door “even for himself.”
This month, the Great Firewall produced another unintended consequence, but this one embarrassed the entire CCP, not just the technology’s creator. A consortium of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) received leaked documents exposing the presence of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance technology in Pakistan, Myanmar, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia. It is unclear how this information leaked or who was behind its exposure. But for a brief moment, the world caught a glimpse at the insidious spread of China’s repressive cyber regime.
The company behind the export of the Great Firewall is Geedge Networks. Its chief scientist is none other than Fang Binxing. According to public information from the Hainan provincial government, Fang’s work at Geedge Networks focuses on cooperation with Beijing’s partners in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Chinese government’s global infrastructure project. Amnesty International, one of the NGOs that examined the data leaks in Pakistan, underscores that Geedge Networks “was founded…as part of China’s ‘Going Out’ Belt and Road Initiative.”
These details matter, principally because the BRI includes a network of nearly 150 countries. This broader scope suggests that Geedge’s presence in Pakistan, Myanmar, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia is not isolated or boutique, but part of the CCP’s expansive understanding of “security.” As I have previously written in The Dispatch, Beijing’s understanding of national security is not threat mitigation, but threat elimination. Such is the party’s brittleness and insecurity that it must control speech about itself not only within China’s borders, but also abroad.
Moreover, Geedge’s capabilities are substantial, offering authoritarian governments surveillance tools well beyond the “lawful intercept” services available through most telecommunications systems. According to InterSecLab, a member of the consortium that published these leaks, China’s censorship exports equip partners like Kazakhstan “to eavesdrop on the entire country’s network and mobile communications.” Per Geedge’s website, the technology can “decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic between server and client.”
Governments have leveraged censorship technology to cut off internet access in real time. Between 2021 and 2023, the Ethiopian government restricted internet and social media access on several occasions. Many of these actions were taken in the context of the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, widely considered one of this century’s deadliest conflicts. Throughout this time, Geedge technology was present and operational in Ethiopia. Authorities may have also leveraged Geedge technology to quell local protests involving the Orthodox Church.
According to Justice for Myanmar, an NGO that reviewed the leaked Geedge data, the country’s military leadership conducted “nearly 1,500 arrests for anti-junta content on Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram” between 2022 and 2024. And Chinese surveillance tools enabled Myanmar’s autocratic government to not only scan public posts but also to access private messaging.
The use of censorship and surveillance technology to isolate, silence, and oppress a citizenry offends the American notion of free speech and limited government. Vice President J.D. Vance said as much during remarks at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year: “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America.” He went on to criticize the United Kingdom, Sweden, Romania, and the European Union for censoring speech and, more broadly, for being “afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.”
His speech was provocative, but in a larger sense, it was quite American. Take away free speech, and you destroy the workability of the U.S. system of government. Vance seems to understand that censorship in Europe impacts the freedom of Americans at home.
It is concerning, then, that the Trump administration has largely refrained from condemning the CCP’s draconian censorship and surveillance. While the White House leans heavily on NATO partners to sanction China for purchasing Russian oil, criticizes Europe for draconian speech laws, and questions the entire transatlantic relationship, it has not commented on the Geedge leaks.
More fundamentally, Washington has refrained from contending with Fang Binxing’s pièce de résistance. As I wrote in Countering China’s Great Game, the Great Firewall embodies the CCP’s greatest weakness: viewing the Chinese people as a threat. Exploiting this asymmetric weakness would not be impossible. As former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger told me in 2023, the Great Firewall is “a series of bricks” that can be dismantled. “Just like the Great Wall of China,” Pottinger elaborated, “these things can be bypassed, undermined. People can break through.” Asked whether the U.S. government was working to dismantle it, he replied, “I left government two years ago, and I can tell you that the U.S. government was doing very, very little—very little—to even attempt to overcome the Great Firewall.” Fatalism had paralyzed Washington, Pottinger explained, and officials assumed there was no way to push back against the CCP’s cyber regime.
Overcoming that fatalism is critical to protecting the values Americans hold so dear. Europeans may not embrace our robust vision of free speech, but neither are they exporting a competing set of values aimed at destroying it. The CCP is doing just that. During a Politburo gathering in May 2021, Xi Jinping exhorted his comrades to “target different regions, different countries, and different groups of audiences” with “precise communications methods” to “make friends, unite and win the majority, and constantly expand our circle of friends who know China and are China-friendly.” That may sound benign, but internal party communiques expose Xi’s Orwellian intent. Consider the 2013 “Document 9,” a memorandum circulated by the CCP General Office. It contrasts belief in “the free flow of information” with “the Marxist view of news,” and calls for strengthening “guidance of public opinion …[to] purify the environment of public opinion on the internet.”
Beijing is leveraging censorship and surveillance technology to control speech globally. That cancer, if left unaddressed, will spread beyond Beijing’s authoritarian partners and infect the free world. Indeed, it is already happening. Look no further than TikTok, which the CCP controls and leverages to advance its own interests within the United States as the Trump administration’s proposed deal hangs in limbo.
The success of Beijing’s gambit is predicated in large part on secrecy. The Geedge leaks expose the advance of the CCP’s global censorship regime, which cuts against the party’s preferences. But it also relies on American fatalism. As long as officials assume the party’s efforts are untouchable, the CCP will continue to advance. It is past time to start dismantling the Great Firewall, brick by brick.
