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China Network The Internet

Chinese Programmer Ordered To Pay 1 Million Yuan For Using VPN 35

Posted by BeauHD from the no-outside-business-permitted dept.
Amy Hawkins reports via The Guardian: A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1 million yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China's "great firewall." The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on August 18. The notice said Ma had used "unauthorised channels" to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company. The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan ($145,092) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as "illegal income," as well as fining him 200 yuan ($27). Charlie Smith (a pseudonym), the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet censorship in China, said: "Even if this decision is overturned in court, a message has been sent and damage has been done. Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?"
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Chinese Programmer Ordered To Pay 1 Million Yuan For Using VPN More

Chinese Programmer Ordered To Pay 1 Million Yuan For Using VPN

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  • It's getting real all over the world.

  • "Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?"

    as though it weren't before...

    • "Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?"

      as though it weren't before...

      Doing business outside China is not illegal.

      The American company I work for employs people in China and has for twenty years.

      The guy in TFA wasn't arrested for "doing business". He was arrested for circumventing the GFWOC. But the real reason was so that bureaucrats had an excuse to grab his income.

      • Wouldn't the employees be doing the same thing if they VPN into your systems?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Wouldn't the employees be doing the same thing if they VPN into your systems?

          Yes but his company probably hires its people legally. VPN is the clickbait red herring to make the story interesting to guardian readers.

      • ⦠and have you already moved your savings outside of Cheena?

      • He got busted for working 'online' and not paying taxes.
        Has most likely nothing to do with VPN or TGFWOC.

        And he was not ordered to pay a 1million fine, his 1million in earnings got confiscated. The fine was 27yuang.

        It is all in the summary.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Circumventing the great firewall is a legally grey area in China. The firewall isn't the same everywhere either, for example around Shenzhen it's a lot more permissive because the tech companies based there need to access things like Western social media (for advertising and customer relations) and test tech that is destined for export markets.

        The crackdown seems to be on individuals doing it. Naomi Wu was recently forced to stop using most Western platforms, for example. It's really shitty because she is a

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jonadab ( 583620 )
        In practice, there isn't any reasonable way to do business both inside of and outside of China[1], without circumventing the Great Firewall. Pretty much all substantial Chinese businesses do it, and absolutely *all* non-mainland-Chinese companies that do business inside of mainland China, must do so as well.

        This is one of hundreds of things that are technically illegal in China but everyone does them all the time anyway, and you only get in trouble for it if you come to the attention (in a bad way) of some

    • No
      The headline is wrong.

  • He cut out the required middleman (Score:4, Informative)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Monday October 09, 2023 @07:38PM (#63913633)
    China requires people working jobs for foreign companies to work via a dispatch agent or a service outsourcing company. It is illegal both for the citizen and the foreign company to directly engage. There are all kinds of rules that China want the employer to agree to. This doesn't work if there isn't a middleman to enforce these rules.
  • Employment is "illegal income" and using the global internet is "unauthorized channels". Okay then everyone else I guess gets a pass for wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Either how strong was his politically-unaware nerdism or whom did he offend in the CCP?

  • Doesn't every Chinese worker who works for a US or foreign company do this?

  • He was fined $27 for using a VPN. He had his illegal income derrived from working for a Turkish company confiscated. That has zero to do with a VPN or the Great Firewall.

    • Yes the article is not clear. "the police seized his phone, [..] upon learning that he worked for an overseas company", I'm not in China so I don't know theirs laws but if I work for an overseas company without telling anything to gov administration I will have big problems too.

  • A nation afraid of its people... (Score:3)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @03:08AM (#63914327)
    ...having information (from around the world)

    is weak at the core.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not all that different to how our governments are soiling themselves over the threat of misinformation from Russia, North Korea, China of course, and now Iran.

      I'm not sure what's worse really. The government blocking it, or Facebook spreading anti-vaxx, election stealing, climate change denying misinformation. Of course the Chinese government is worse in terms of what it blocks, e.g. Tiananmen and the Uighur "re-education" camps, but things aren't great here either.

    • It's not, so there's that.

  • It must be true.

  • Xi is working hard to erase the West's fears of a new Chinese-dominated world order, by killing his own economy. That's not his intention, of course, but it's the effect of these sorts of actions. And it's not like he doesn't know it, though I think he underestimates how bad it is. He sees the economic damage as a necessary cost of re-asserting social control.

    I expect it to continue in this vein for another decade or two, until the economic harm of decoupling from the world is made incontrovertible, to th

  • They're just pissed he didn't declare his taxes, so they confiscated his earnings.
    *Unauthorised* vpn use is a minor infraction with a similarly sized fine.

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