A Wall Within the Wall: Henan’s Experiment Signals a New Era of Chinese Internet Control
A new layer of censorship appears
For decades China’s Great Firewall has symbolised the country’s tight grip on the online information landscape. Yet the latest findings from an international team of censorship,monitoring researchers suggest a fresh—and potentially more unsettling—reality: individual provinces are beginning to build their own walls inside the national one. In the central province of Henan, a locally engineered filtering system has been quietly slicing millions of extra websites out of the global internet, often on a whim, since at least August 2023.
Ten times harsher, far less predictable
Unlike Beijing’s sophisticated, centrally managed infrastructure, Henan’s mechanism relies on relatively simple traffic,inspection rules that target entire second,level domains. Simplicity, however, has bred volatility. At different points between November 2023 and March 2025 the provincial filter blocked roughly 4 million domains—more than five times the tally usually excluded by the national firewall and, at peak moments, up to ten times higher. The filter repeatedly added and removed blanket rules such as “*.com.au”, turning entire swathes of the web on and off overnight.
Businesses in the crosshairs
Where the national system traditionally zeroes in on news outlets, social media platforms and adult content, Henan’s blacklist skews heavily toward business,related domains. Corporate landing pages, SaaS platforms and industry forums have been swept up alongside the usual social and political fare. Observers link this unusual pattern to local unrest: Henan was the epicentre of a 2022 banking scandal that triggered mass protests after depositors lost access to their savings. By throttling access to finance,oriented information, provincial authorities may be trying to dampen fresh waves of dissent or shield state,owned institutions from scrutiny.
Decentralisation of control
Henan is not traditionally associated with the kind of ethnic or separatist tensions that prompted draconian online controls in Xinjiang or Tibet. That a comparatively calm province has rolled out its own filter hints at a broader decentralisation of censorship. Provincial governments, endowed with increasingly powerful technical tools, can now modulate the online environment in line with local political or economic pressures—without waiting for Beijing’s permission. If other regions follow suit, China’s information landscape could fragment into a patchwork of overlapping, sometimes contradictory, “mini,walls”.
The technical arms race
Researchers describe Henan’s approach as blunt but effective: by inspecting outbound traffic and matching domain names against provincial blacklists, it drops connections before users ever reach the global internet. The technique is cheaper to implement than deep,packet inspection and easier to scale. Yet its crudeness also breeds instability; entire domain zones can disappear for days, crippling cloud,based business tools and foreign,owned e,commerce sites that Chinese firms depend on.
On the other side of the battlefield, virtual private networks and encrypted DNS services remain the go,to workarounds. These, too, are facing headwinds: China is expanding machine,learning systems that detect VPN patterns in real time, while fresh regulations threaten hefty fines for VPN providers. The result is a cat,and,mouse contest that increasingly hinges on artificial intelligence—both for censors refining their dragnet and for users seeking ever,stealthier channels out of it.
What it means for the outside world
For multinational companies, Henan’s experiment underscores the fragility of market access in China. A regional directive can now sever a province’s connection to global supply,chain portals, developer documentation or cloud dashboards without notice. Brands reliant on local consumer data may suddenly find themselves blind behind a provincial curtain.
Civil,society groups, meanwhile, must grapple with a new front line. Human,rights researchers have long focused on Beijing; now they must track 31 provincial secrets, each with unique filters, logic, and political motivations.
A warning, not an outlier
The Henan study’s authors frame their discovery as an early warning: regional censorship is no longer an edge case but a scalable, replicable model. While the Great Firewall remains the dominant force, the advent of provincial filters adds layers of opacity—and plenty more uncertainty—to an already murky information regime.
For China’s 1.4 billion netizens the practical takeaway is stark: the internet in Henan today may look very different from the internet in Guangdong or Shanghai tomorrow. And for the rest of the world, the message is simpler still—doing business, sharing ideas or running servers that aim to reach Chinese audiences now requires watching not one wall but potentially many, each rising at its own unpredictable pace.
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