The Locknet

  • The Locknet: How China Controls Its Internet and Why It Matters

    June 30, 2025 The man gazes earnestly into the camera, the glow from his computer monitor reflecting off his black-rimmed glasses. “This is more than just a cultural moment,” he says with a smile. “It’s something truly meaningful. This is about mutual respect, kindness, and efforts to understand each other.

  • I. Meatspace: The Locknet IRL

    Though cyberspace may seem ephemeral and immaterial, it is inherently tied to “meatspace”—the offline, embodied world in which we all live and breathe. The internet, as a product of meatspace, is subject to the dictates of meatspace. Governments and societies around the world seek to mold and constrain the internet

  • II. Service-Level Censorship: The Corporate Locknet

    The much-vaunted “Great Firewall” looms large in the imagination, but much of what an average person in China sees or sends online will never come into contact with it. The “Great Firewall” is just that: a digital border flanking the real one, separating domestic and foreign. As long as Chinese

  • III. Network-Level Censorship: Locknet in the Wires

    Beijing does not need to censor content posted online by its citizens first-hand; it has a retinue of corporate employees and individual nationalists to police domestically-generated internet content. Thus, the censorship technology authorities control more directly targets information seeping in from outside China. These tools perform “network-level censorship,” inspecting data

  • IV. Evading the Locknet

    In February 2022, American-born skier Eileen Gu became an internet sensation in China when she competed at the Beijing Winter Olympics as part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) national team. During her time in China, Gu made multiple posts about her Olympic experiences on Instagram, a platform banned

  • V. The Locknet Leaks Out

    In general, the Locknet only targets communications taking place within or crossing over the country’s borders, removing “bad” or “dangerous” content from circulation. (This contrasts with Beijing’s propaganda efforts, which aim to inject content into both domestic and international discussions.) Even so, the effects of the censorship regime can and

  • VI. The Future of the Locknet

    The continued functioning of the Locknet remains existential for the Chinese Communist Party—it’s a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Control over information, and thus influence over what citizens know and believe, forms part of the bedrock on which the Party edifice stands. In the modern world, this necessarily involves internet censorship.