International investigation: European companies involved in exporting Chinese censorship

Under the guise of technological progress, but in reality as part of a strategy of social and political control, China is exporting sophisticated censorship and surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes around the world, including relying on Western technology, shows a large international journalistic investigation published yesterday by the European website Follow the Money and carried out in cooperation with Paper Trail Media, Der Standard, The Globe and Mail, Amnesty International, Justice for Myanmar, Tor Project and InterSecLab. The journalistic investigation revealed that everything that started with the "Great Firewall” of China, conceived by Fang Binxing, has turned into a global network of digital repression that fuels autocracies in Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia.

The source cited states that leaked data from within the Chinese company Geedge Networks shows that technologies developed by Binxing, nicknamed the "father of the Great Firewall”, have become the foundation of the surveillance infrastructure in these states, real tools capable of blocking VPNs, monitoring internet users, intercepting communications and even launching attacks on inconvenient websites. These tools are implemented on an international scale, turning the entire population into a target. Amnesty International has warned that the effects are devastating for freedom of expression, and Agnès Callamard, the organization's secretary general, has called this mechanism a "dystopian nightmare” that operates in the shadows and drastically reduces access to information.

The impact is already visible. In Myanmar, after the military coup in 2021, the regime used Geedge Networks software to isolate the country's citizens from the rest of the world and crush any form of protest, the investigation cited shows. Journalists from Follow The Money claim that in Ethiopia, in the midst of armed conflict, the blocking of the internet and communications has aggravated a humanitarian catastrophe resulting in hundreds of thousands of victims, and in Pakistan, the digital surveillance, already controversial, has been strengthened by these technologies, transforming censorship tools into a localized "Chinese firewall”. According to the cited source, in all these cases, the goal is the same: silencing critical voices, preventing the organization of the opposition and controlling the public narrative.

• Europe, involved in digital surveillance exercised through the technology of the company Geedge Networks

The investigation also reveals a disturbing element: the success of Geedge Networks would not have been possible without the infrastructure and software of some European and Western companies. Thales Group from France confirmed to those who carried out the journalistic investigation that it provided licensing solutions to the Chinese company, although it denied any involvement in the surveillance functions. Moreover, servers in Alibaba Cloud's German data center were used to distribute installation packages, raising serious questions about the indirect complicity of Europe's digital infrastructure.

Other Western firms-such as Trovicor (now Datafusion Systems, owned by Canada's Lumine Group), Germany's Utimaco, and Sandvine (rebranded AppLogic Networks, headquartered in Canada)-have played a role in the recent history of surveillance in Pakistan and Myanmar, even though some have claimed to have complied with legal regulations and tried to distance themselves from abusive practices.

For Binxing, who has publicly defended censorship as "a common global phenomenon,” exporting these technologies is not just a business, but an extension of China's model of digital authoritarianism. In a recent speech, he announced ambitions to expand into international markets, and documents already show plans to expand to Pakistan, Malaysia, Bahrain, Algeria, and India. In this context, the warning of human rights organizations is clear: once these tools are implemented, digital freedom and citizens' privacy are practically nullified.