‘Once a person tastes freedom, they won’t go back to watching the CCP’s toxic media,’ said Gan Wenwei, who helped Chinese people bypass the internet firewall.
A young man who helped around 5 million Chinese people bypass China’s Great Firewall is wanted by the Chinese regime and has applied for political asylum in the Netherlands.
Gan Wenwei, 31, from Wuhan City, was arrested in August last year by Chinese police for selling virtual private network (VPN) software to those seeking to bypass China’s Great Firewall internet controls.
As an internet-addicted youth, Gan worked at an internet cafe after dropping out of primary school so that he could surf the web for free.
“I personally always had the need to access Google, Twitter, and even some overseas websites and media,” he told NTD, the sister media of The Epoch Times, in an interview conducted in Chinese on March 4.
“Then I realized that there were others like me who needed to access foreign media, including overseas websites like YouTube, etc. They didn’t have a way to do it, and they didn’t understand the technology. So, I ended up entering this industry on my own,” Gan said.
China’s Great Firewall, also known as the Golden Shield Project, was set up in 1998 and managed by the communist regime’s Ministry of Public Security to censor what can and cannot be seen in the country. The firewall bans major websites and social media platforms including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo.
The act of bypassing internet censorship with VPN software is commonly referred to as “bypassing the wall.”
According to an estimate in 2019 by Li Zhi’an, a professor and an expert in Chinese internet law from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, there were 20 to 30 million internet users in China using VPNs.
In the early stages of his career, Gan joined a Telegram group that included around 100 people who helped each other navigate the Great Firewall and any technical challenges that arose.
“Over the past 10 years, there have been intermittent periods of losing contact and even disappearing, including some people withdrawing. But overall, we’ve maintained stable communication with about 30 people,” he said. “These 30 people form a kind of mutual support group, almost like an industry association. Whenever there are technical challenges, we solve them together, and if there are procurement issues, we also tackle them as a team.”
Gan estimated that the team had received nearly 5 million orders in China for VPN software packages in the past year.
“For security reasons, I basically delete my data once a month, and I only keep about a month’s worth of data, [which is] around 400,000 orders,” he said.
Gan specifically pointed out that due to the Chinese regime’s firewall, most mainstream international VPN providers are essentially unusable in China. The circle of Chinese VPN software providers have their own set of proxy tools and methods. However, these methods are subject to crackdowns, and authorities frequently update their blocking techniques.
“Chinese VPN software is actually not what we, as Chinese people abroad, traditionally understand as a VPN. There are no overseas orders. All the orders are from Chinese users.”
By Cindy Li
