According to the Epoch Times, Beijing’s latest censorship push has moved beyond controlling what Chinese citizens say online to policing who is speaking and whether they can see anything beyond the Party’s information perimeter. Schools across China have ordered all teaching staff to register every personal social media account with employers, while the Party’s telecom regulators are pressing the country’s three state-owned carriers to seal off cross-border internet traffic. The two campaigns, running in parallel, reflect a deliberate, coordinated tightening of both speech and access.
In recent weeks, school administrators at institutions across China have circulated forms requiring all teaching and administrative staff to disclose the details of every personal social media account they operate. The required disclosures are extensive: account name, account ID, profile page link, follower count, content category, posting frequency, and whether the account carries any verified certification badge.
The platforms covered by the registration drive span virtually every major Chinese social media service, including WeChat, the dominant messaging and blogging platform; Douyin, the domestic counterpart to TikTok; Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle platform known outside China as “Little Red Book”; the microblogging service Weibo; the short-video platform Kuaishou; the Q&A community Zhihu; the news aggregator Jinri Toutiao; and the podcast platform Xiaoyuzhou. Schools were instructed to flag any accounts on platforms not listed, writing in the name of the service by hand.
A widely circulated post published on April 17 by a WeChat public account called “Living Without Makeup” documented the experience firsthand. The author wrote that this was already the third time in two years that school authorities had demanded personal social media disclosures since opening a public account. Each successive round, the author noted, felt more formal and more serious than the last. The current registration felt less like routine paperwork and more like something legally binding.
The author raised the obvious question: every platform already polices its users. WeChat deletes offending posts, blocks comments, or permanently bans accounts that cross political lines. Why must employers also maintain a parallel registry? The author invoked an image from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, in which a monk is fitted with an enchanted metal headband that his master can tighten at any moment as punishment or control. Each new round of registration, the author wrote, “feels like they’re putting another hat on your head, another metal band around it.” The comparison was pointed: even when the band is not being tightened, the knowledge that someone else holds the trigger changes how you move.
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The campaign has spread beyond schools. Reports circulating on Chinese social media indicate that Buddhist monasteries across the country have also received instructions requiring monks and other residents to submit details of all personal social media accounts to religious authorities.
Beyond the registration drive, a separate wave of account deletions has swept across Chinese social media platforms. Among those eliminated are accounts covering current affairs, domestic travel, and local weather reporting. The breadth of the closures makes clear the campaign targets independent voices across categories, not only political ones.
The pattern is consistent with the Party’s approach over the past several years: steadily narrowing the space for independent content creation by eliminating categories of speech one by one. A crackdown that began with explicitly political commentary has expanded to cover anything that might give ordinary people an unmediated view of Chinese society.
Party regulators order state telecom carriers to seal off all cross-border internet traffic
At the same time, the Party’s internet regulators are moving to close the country’s remaining channels to the outside internet.
On April 8, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Party’s internet regulatory body, convened a national conference in Beijing to set priorities for what officials described, in their preferred framing, as “internet rule of law”. Among the agenda items was a specific focus on “outbound internet connections,” the bureaucratic euphemism for citizens using virtual private network tools, known as VPNs, to access foreign websites by bypassing the Party’s “Great Firewall,” the vast system of filters, blocks, and surveillance infrastructure that keeps the Chinese internet sealed off from the global one.
In parallel, the Party’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology convened a closed-door meeting with officials from China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom, the three state-owned carriers that control China’s telecommunications infrastructure. The meeting addressed what authorities called “irregular use of cross-border data leased lines” and “cross-border internet connection management.” Commentators who reviewed the meeting notice described it as a precursor to tightening approval requirements for corporate cross-border connections and directing the carriers to improve technical monitoring and filtering to cut off outbound data channels.
The paper trail from individual companies makes clear that the orders are already cascading down to end users. On April 2, an unnamed internet service company wrote to its customers saying it had received an emergency directive from carrier and regulatory authorities, effective April 1, requiring all customers to sign a compliance pledge. The notice warned that any IP address found accessing foreign websites in violation of the rules would be shut down immediately, with noncompliance triggering wider network outages.
A notice dated March 31 from Shandong Jianyan Cloud Computing, a regional internet service provider, circulated online and stated that the company was operating under orders from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to implement a total ban on overseas traffic effective that day. The notice prohibited domestic IP addresses from reaching any destination outside mainland China and banned all VPN and proxy services. Users were told to audit their own systems and eliminate any software or behavior involving foreign access. Violators faced immediate IP termination with no refund or compensation.
A near-identical notice circulated on April 8 under the header of Shaanxi Telecom, a regional arm of China Telecom. That notice extended the traffic prohibition explicitly to Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan in addition to foreign countries, and laid out six enforcement measures: immediate termination and IP banning for violations, no resource retention after termination, no provider liability for any resulting losses, no refunds for fees already paid, no support for service adjustments or transfers if the ban disrupts a customer’s operations, and future reinstatement decisions left entirely to carrier discretion with no commitments offered.
The near-identical language across the Shandong and Shaanxi notices makes clear these are centrally drafted orders distributed through regional carriers for local implementation, a signature of a unified, nationwide directive.
Programmers, traders, researchers, and foreign businesses face the sharpest disruptions
Wen Zhao, an overseas Chinese political commentator based abroad who draws a large mainland audience through viewers accessing his programs via VPN, said the practical effects are already visible. Viewership from mainland China has dropped in recent weeks, consistent with tightening VPN access.
Wen identified four professional groups facing the most severe disruption: software engineers and programmers who depend on foreign technical platforms and code repositories; e-commerce operators whose businesses rely on overseas payment, logistics, and platform access; financial professionals and international lawyers who need unmediated access to foreign markets and legal databases; and faculty and researchers at universities and research institutions who require foreign academic resources.
Wen stopped short of predicting total enforcement. He offered a characterization of Xi Jinping’s governance that circulates with dark humor in dissident circles: “The biggest feature of the Xi Jinping era can be summed up in two words everyone knows: ‘abandoned midway.'” Rules start strict, enforcement begins with a flourish, but how far it actually goes is another matter. His expectation is that economic self-interest will drive enough people to find workarounds that the ban erodes in practice even if it stays on the books.
Political commentator Li Linyi, another overseas analyst who covers CCP governance, offered a harder assessment. The Party, he argued, understands perfectly well that an aggressive internet lockdown damages China’s economy. It proceeds anyway because the calculus has shifted: the regime now treats information control as a prerequisite for political survival, and political survival takes priority over economic performance. Li framed it as the behavior of a regime acting in self-preservation mode, taking measures it knows are self-wounding because the alternative, a population with unfiltered access to the outside world, appears more threatening than the economic cost.
