Under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, two legal paradoxes persist that many citizens have come to accept as normal — yet they raise profound concerns upon closer examination.
Paradox One: The CCP has never officially acknowledged the existence of the “Great Firewall” in any public statement or legal text. Yet, the act of “bypassing the firewall” is treated as a violation of law and subject to punishment.
Paradox Two: Many people have still not noticed that, despite searching through all of China’s current laws, there is no legal provision explicitly defining Falun Gong as a “heretical organization” or “cult.” Yet, anyone who states, “I practice Falun Gong,” may face the risk of arrest, imprisonment, or even loss of life.
These two paradoxes are not mere oversights in China’s legal system, but rather a concentrated expression of what critics describe as the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian and coercive nature. While the Constitution formally enshrines freedoms of belief, speech, publication, and assembly, in practice the Party can arbitrarily deprive individuals of liberty—and even life—without requiring any explicit legal justification.
‘Is the wall itself legal?’ exposing a legal black box
Whenever internet users inside China’s domestic network attempt to explore the outside world, they are often warned: “bypassing the firewall is illegal.” But a more fundamental question remains largely unexamined: is the “Great Firewall” itself lawful?
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Chinese lawyer He of Henan has publicly pointed out a frequently overlooked fact: as of today, China’s internet firewall is not legally grounded. In official discourse, agencies such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology do not acknowledge the firewall’s existence; and in legal terms, there is no statute in Chinese law that explicitly authorizes its establishment.
This creates what critics describe as an absurd legal trap: authorities deny the firewall exists, yet bypassing it is treated as a crime. Under the basic legal principle that “what is not authorized by law is prohibited,” the absence of clear legal authorization or formal statutory basis raises serious questions about the legitimacy of operating such a system—one that blocks and restricts access to the global internet for over a billion citizens.
At its core, the firewall is described by critics as a 24/7, indiscriminate state-level cyber operation against all domestic internet users. Its mechanisms include DNS poisoning, BGP route hijacking, deep packet inspection (DPI), and even AI-driven systems to precisely block circumvention traffic. If any private individual used such techniques, they would face severe criminal punishment. Yet these same methods are deployed openly by state authorities on a nationwide scale. This is widely summarized by the Chinese saying: “Officials are allowed to set fires, while common people are not even allowed to light lamps.”
Another concealed paradox: the “unfounded” persecution of Falun Gong
Why has the Chinese Communist Party spent enormous financial and political resources—and assumed the risks of violating both international and domestic law—to construct and maintain what critics describe as an illegal firewall? This question leads to a second, more disturbing paradox.
Many people in China, under prolonged state propaganda, mistakenly believe that the suppression of Falun Gong has a legal basis. However, within the Party’s own legal framework, the persecution of Falun Gong has never been formally codified. China’s Criminal Law and relevant National People’s Congress decisions have never officially designated Falun Gong as an illegal organization. Even more notably, among the 14 officially listed “evil cults” published by China’s Ministry of Public Security, Falun Gong is not included.
The campaign of suppression, initiated in 1999, was triggered not by legislative process but, as critics allege, by the personal will and political rivalry of then-leader Jiang Zemin. Through a single directive and a commentary published in the People’s Daily, the full apparatus of the state was mobilized. In this sense, it mirrors the same logic as the firewall paradox: denial of legal foundation on one hand, and enforcement through coercion on the other. It does not rely on law—it relies on enforced fear and obedience.
Since July 1999, for more than a quarter of a century, the Chinese state has conducted a sweeping crackdown on tens of millions of practitioners of the “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance” faith. Reported measures have included extralegal detention, sentencing, torture, and what has been described as one of the most severe alleged human rights abuses of the modern era: forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. This campaign, characterized by its critics as a form of ongoing mass persecution, has continued for 27 years without interruption.
The true purpose of the firewall: concealing crimes, blocking self-rescue, and extending harm globally
The Chinese Communist Party has spent enormous financial and institutional resources constructing the so-called “Great Firewall.” While officially justified as serving “national security,” critics argue that a closer examination of history reveals three far more troubling underlying purposes.
In fact, the timeline of China’s internet firewall (the “Golden Shield Project”) closely coincides with the launch of the nationwide crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999. From the outset, critics argue, the purpose of the firewall was not to defend against external threats, but to obscure alleged human rights abuses, including the persecution of Falun Gong and reports of forced organ harvesting.
Beijing is well aware that Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to access information freely, and that information transparency is a critical vulnerability for authoritarian systems. If the public were to fully understand the allegations surrounding the persecution of Falun Gong—or reports of organ harvesting—the legitimacy of the regime could, in this view, be fundamentally undermined. From this perspective, the firewall serves to block external visibility and contain information flows, allowing state actions to remain shielded from scrutiny.
A second function of the firewall, critics argue, is the creation of a closed information ecosystem that facilitates large-scale ideological control. Within this environment, a selective and heavily curated information space shapes public perception, reinforcing conformity and discouraging dissent.
Over time, this environment is said to normalize abnormal social conditions: individuals find it increasingly difficult to speak out against injustice, while collective action is often labeled as “illegal assembly.” Even basic avenues of petitioning or grievance redress can be restricted or suppressed.
More troublingly, critics warn that when widespread abuses go unchallenged—such as the alleged persecution of Falun Gong practitioners—it risks normalizing unchecked state power. Once such precedents are established, they argue, the absence of legal or institutional constraints creates a system in which no individual is truly safe. In this view, what begins as targeted repression can gradually expand, affecting broader segments of society under conditions of informational opacity and weak accountability.
Critics argue that the ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party extend far beyond controlling 1.4 billion Chinese citizens. While the Great Firewall blocks domestic users from accessing external information, it also serves as a barrier enabling what is described as strategic information asymmetry and narrative manipulation abroad.
According to this view, the Party maintains a dual information system: within the firewall, strict censorship and repression shape domestic discourse; outside the firewall, it leverages the openness of Western societies to conduct large-scale external propaganda campaigns and promote what it calls “telling China’s story well.” Critics contend that this dual structure allows it to present a carefully curated image internationally while obscuring alleged human rights abuses domestically.
Through a combination of economic incentives and carefully managed narratives, the Party is accused by critics of attempting to neutralize international scrutiny of alleged crimes against humanity, while simultaneously exporting elements of its authoritarian governance model abroad. In their assessment, this represents an effort not only to reshape global perceptions but also to undermine universal values and expand authoritarian influence worldwide.
From this perspective, dismantling the Great Firewall is seen not only as essential for Chinese citizens seeking truth and self-determination, but also as a broader issue of global significance in confronting authoritarian information control.
Breaking through the firewall: truth as the only path to self-rescue
Faced with what critics describe as a governance model rooted in coercion, censorship, and information control, the answer, they argue, is to “break through the firewall” and reclaim access to truth.
Since the onset of the 1999 crackdown, practitioners of Falun Gong have, according to supporters, demonstrated resilience and ingenuity in developing anti-censorship tools such as Freegate and UltraSurf to bypass internet restrictions. Over more than two decades, despite extensive state resources devoted to censorship, critics argue that complete information control has never been fully achieved.
In this framing, bypassing censorship is not merely about accessing foreign news or entertainment, but about restoring informational balance in a system where truth is obscured. It is described as a means of recognizing risk, preventing harm, and resisting manipulation in an environment where legal protections and transparency are perceived as weak.
Ultimately, this perspective calls for rejecting indoctrination and recognizing what it characterizes as the illegitimacy of censorship structures and political repression. As more individuals seek independent access to information and reject state-controlled narratives, proponents argue that systems built on censorship and coercion will eventually face fundamental collapse.
(This article reflects the author’s personal views and opinions.)
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