China

Arthur Kaufman | May 19, 2025

Researchers from the censorship monitoring platform Great Firewall Report (GFW Report) published an investigation last week that “sounds the alarm” about the emergence of regional online censorship in China. They noted that in August 2023, netizens in Henan began reporting an uptick in inaccessible websites that were accessible elsewhere in the country. Their investigation found no evidence of region-specific censorship in the other areas analyzed—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Sichuan—but did find that Henan censored a massive amount of content beyond that blocked by China’s national-level Great Firewall. GFW Report authors Mingshi Wu, Ali Zohaib, Zakir Durumeric, Amir Houmansadr, and Eric Wustrow provided more detail on the scale, targets, and potential motivations of Henan’s firewall: