The Chinese Communist Party falls short of its goals. Consider the goal of totally controlling all that people see and say on the Chinese Internet. People are still sometimes seeing and saying forbidden things there—despite the Great Firewall, despite armies of censors ready to leap into action, despite the risk of being questioned by police and even imprisoned. The people of China are not perfectly controlled, are not universally or completely obedient.
Some are much more obedient than others, to an extent that makes this Newsweek headline, taken literally, way false: “China’s New Internet Law Raises Privacy Fears for 1 Billion Users” (July 16, 2025).
China has officially launched internet identification requirements that rights groups have warned will further curtail online anonymity and increase the risks for freedom of speech in what is already one of the world’s strictest online censorship and surveillance systems.
The new mechanism developed by the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China came into effect on Tuesday.
The internet in China is already tightly controlled and censored. The “Great Firewall” blocks the country’s more than one billion users from accessing international sites and services without a government-approved virtual private network app, or VPN.
There’s blocking and there’s blocking. With the disgraceful help of Apple and Google app stores, China has made it harder and harder for the Chinese to use VPNs; even so, not all usage of VPNs in China is government-approved usage. Some people in China actively evade online censorship by using VPNs without first asking the Chinese Communist Party if this is okay.
For now, registration is voluntary but authorities have been encouraging public and private services and general users to adopt it. Many major platforms including the popular WeChat messaging and payments system are using it. Registration could increasingly become necessary for anyone navigating the internet in China.
It will become compulsory.
Having reason to believe that China’s official population figures are fake, we’re not even sure that there are as many as a billion people in the country, let alone a billion people surfing the web. But whatever the number of Chinese, a lot, who use the Internet, a certain definite and probably dispiritingly high percentage of those users couldn’t care less about the Party’s latest assaults on their privacy and freedom of speech and Internet navigation.
Such people might become somewhat annoyed at the new hoops they will have to jump through. But that’s it. If every Chinese person being censored and surveilled by his government were afraid of and angered by every tightening of the noose, the consent of the people to be governed as they are being governed would not be as widespread as it is. The CCP would have a harder time oppressing everybody, however imperfectly, than it does.
