The Guardian - China-Chinese programmer ordered to pay 1m yuan for using virtual private network
October 9, 2023 4 min 682 words
这则报道再次凸显了中国互联网审查的严苛性，以及政府对绕过“伟大防火墙”的行为采取的强硬态度。一位程序员因使用虚拟私人网络（VPN）被罚款100多万元人民币，据称这是绕过中国“伟大防火墙”行为中迄今为止最严重的个人经济处罚。这一事件引发了一系列问题和争议。 首先，VPN在中国被视为法律灰色地带。虽然理论上允许公司为商业活动使用政府批准的VPN，但政府对个人使用VPN绕过审查的行为选择性地采取打压。这导致了法律不确定性，使人们感到恐惧，不知道自己是否会受到惩罚。这种不确定性不仅对中国的科技行业产生了负面影响，还对国际合作和交流构成了威胁。 此外，这起案件引发了质疑，即当局是否更关心利润而非打击犯罪。一些人认为，政府正在追求罚款以填补地方政府财政赤字，而不是为了维护社会秩序和法律公正。这引发了对中国经济状况的更深层次担忧，因为地方政府负债累累，已经采取了各种创造性手段来增加收入。 最后，这一事件也引发了对中国言论自由和互联网自由的担忧。中国政府一直在努力限制人们访问国际网站和社交媒体，这对信息流通和开放性讨论构成了障碍。这起案件再次突显了中国对言论和信息的控制，引发了人们对审查制度的合理性和合法性的质疑。 综上所述，这则报道凸显了中国在互联网审查方面的严格控制，以及对违反审查规定的严厉惩罚。这引发了对法律不确定性、政府动机以及言论自由的广泛讨论和担忧。
A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1m yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall”.
The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on 18 August. The notice said Ma had used “unauthorised channels” to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company.
The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan (£120,651) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as “illegal income”, as well as fining him 200 yuan (£23).
Ma said on Weibo that the police had first approached him a year ago, believing him to be the owner of a Twitter account they were investigating. Ma said the account did not belong to him. “I stated that I was currently working for an overseas company, and my personal Twitter only occasionally liked and retweeted the company’s tweets,” Ma wrote. His post has since been deleted but was archived by China Digital Times.
Ma said the police seized his phone, laptop and several computer hard drives upon learning that he worked for an overseas company, holding them for a month. He was later asked to provide details about his work, his bank details, his employment contract and other information, before being issued with the penalty in August. Ma said he would be appointing a lawyer to appeal against the decision.
Charlie Smith (a pseudonym), the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet censorship in China, said: “Even if this decision is overturned in court, a message has been sent and damage has been done. Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?”
VPNs, which help users circumvent the “great firewall” of internet censorship by making it look as if their device is in a different country, operate in a legal grey area in China. Technically, companies are allowed to use government-approved VPNs for commercial activities. Businesses and universities rely on the software to communicate with international partners.
The government generally turns a blind eye to the relatively small number of individuals who use the technology to access websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and, often, view pornography. But in recent years the government has been making it harder for people to access the VPNs, and in rare cases has punished their use.
Several people have been jailed for selling VPNs. In 2017, a man named Wu Xiangyang was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, and fined 500,000 yuan, for selling the software. In June, Radio Free Asia reported that a Uyghur student, Mehmut Memtimin, was serving a 13-year sentence in Xinjiang for using a VPN to access “illegal information”.
Ma said he only used a VPN to access Zoom for meetings and that most of his work, which uses GitHub, could be done without scaling the firewall.
In discussion about the incident on Zhihu, China’s Reddit-like platform, one user wrote: “If we impose convictions and fines based on this reason, China’s IT industry would basically be wiped out.” The comment has since been deleted.
Ma and the Turkish company he is believed to have worked for did not respond to requests for comment.
The case raised questions that authorities were profit-seeking rather than crime-fighting. In a now-deleted Weibo post, an influencer wrote: “This incident has become an international laughing stock, and the police in a certain place have become synonymous with robbers.”
Local governments in China are laden with an estimated $23tn of debt, which economists see as a brewing crisis in the country’s economy. Already, several municipalities have struggled to pay for salaries and public services and have resorted to creative measures to boost their coffers. In Chengde, the city’s revenues from forfeitures reached nearly 990m yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of more than 7%.
Chengde’s public security bureau did not respond to calls from the Guardian.
Additional research by Chi Hui Lin