Digital Dissidents Are Fighting China’s Censorship Machine

The face of dissent isn’t easy to recognize in modern China. Laborer Quan Shixin spends most days planting trees and spraying pesticide in a man-made forest on the outskirts of Beijing. She makes less than $10,000 a year and never went to university—not the kind of person you’d expect to be steeped in such things as end-to-end encryption, virtual private networks, or cryptographic authentication. But in her spare time, Quan has learned to bypass the country’s Great Firewall, the digital blockade separating the global internet from China’s 800 million web users. With such a set of web tools, she fights what she calls unfair actions by her local government.

The 43-year-old says she had to get more tech savvy after local officials seized her village’s land for commercial development without what she viewed as proper compensation. Friends introduced her to digital tools to help her communicate with like-minded people. She uses what she’s learned to file petitions appealing to the central government to intervene in local cases and to blow off steam on social networks such as Twitter that are banned inside China. “The wall is becoming higher and higher,” says Quan, who was jailed twice last year for posting controversial remarks on social media. “But if I don’t speak out, I feel suffocated. Expression is a basic right.”