HRIC Digital Rights Report: June 2026
Welcome to the HRIC Digital Rights Report, our monthly roundup of developments in China’s digital rights landscape, including cybersecurity, AI, digital transnational repression, censorship, the Great Firewall, and internet freedom.
This Month: Information Control and Manufactured Ignorance
In June, we revisit China’s increasing restrictions on VPNs to examine how suppressing access to information leads to historical amnesia. While the Great Firewall has been met with admirable resistance from within China over the years, recent analysis shows circumvention has been lower than many advocates hoped. As a result, information from the outside world has struggled to gain traction. For example, the collective efforts of the June Fourth protests have been successfully obscured for many young Chinese, who were surprised to learn the scale of the nationwide movement when a video on the topic went viral last month.
A New Leak Shows Minimal VPN Usage Within Xinjiang, China
China has made no secret of its ambition to exert total control over internet access within its borders through use of the Great Firewall. However, as online Magazine ChinaFile describes, “as long as Beijing has been censoring content online, people in China have been finding ways around that censorship.” VPNs were once an easier mechanism in which to do so, and downloading these applications was standard practice for anyone seeking information free of CCP influence.
This is becoming no longer the case. As reported in our April Digital Rights Brief, many security tools such as VPNs are shutting down due to operation difficulties, leaving users with fewer and fewer options to “climb the digital wall.” While state-sanctioned VPNs are still available, these are heavily monitored and block many outside websites, serving more as a surveillance tool for the government than a useful mechanism for information access. This leaves unauthorized VPNs as the only option for an internet free of restrictions.
Until recently, it has been difficult to measure the success of the CCP’s efforts in circumventing the use of these banned applications. A new report, however, uses leaked internet network traffic records, including over 100,000 documents kept by the Chinese company Geedge Networks, to offer key insights. Notably, this data was focused on the Xinjiang region, the most surveilled region in China largely occupied by the oppressed Uyghur ethnic group. Therefore, it is expected that, on average, these individuals would self-censor far more and be less likely to search for prohibited applications than in other parts of the country. This significantly limits the applicability of the findings.
Nevertheless, results show that internet traffic outside China made up just 4% of overall internet usage on average in this region. There was also evidence that VPN usage is limited to a small number of individuals and that attempted internet connections to websites such as Google were likely unstable or unsuccessful. This points to a lack of availability and/or reliance on VPNs. Whether this low usage rate is because China has successfully blocked these applications or because individuals are too afraid to use it given the risks, what is clear is that the internet in Xinjiang has been successfully isolated from the outside world.
37 Years Later, Young Chinese Citizens Reconceptualize June 4th After Learning More About the Political Movement
In 2026, online activities commemorating June Fourth were stronger than ever before, both inside and outside the Great Firewall. Teacher Li’s tweets, with material provided by HRIC, gathered more than 10 million views on X alone. Newly released videos from ITN and new pictures from HRIC and Epoch Times provided a broader picture of the solidarity from Chinese people from all walks of life. In her latest YouTube episode, former CCTV journalist Chai Jing focused on the 1989 June Fourth Massacre. She highlighted the protesters—students, citizens, a soldier who said “When the order comes, I’ll kill myself first”—and even included an interview with Xu Zongmao, a Taiwanese China Times reporter who was shot in Tiananmen Square.
In just three days, Chai Jing’s video garnered nearly half a million views. Many young Chinese began engaging in heated discussions on the topic across social media platforms. Some remarked on how different life was then, where ordinary people protected the protestors, urged the soldiers for peace, and reported the truth of what was happening, as compared to the prevalent political apathy or ultranationalism of today.
Many recognized, for the first time, the scale of the nationwide movement, realizing that it drew participation from all across Chinese society, not only students. They learned from others who commented on the video how a million Beijing citizens took to the streets to block the military; how during the crackdown the casualty ratio between citizens and students was as high as ten to one; how a carpenter from Jiangsu saved a reporter from Taiwan; how hospitals across the city treated the wounded unconditionally, overflowing with patients; and how Beijing nurses calmly handed retrieved bullets to Taiwanese scholars, simply hoping to “let the world see” what happened here.
Through sharing this video, Chinese netizens spread the message that reducing the 1989 movement to a story of “hot-blooded students opposing the government” obscures the truth: that it was a collective expression of people from all walks of life, and a shared dream of Chinese people worldwide.
How Information Control Leads to Pervasive Ignorance
The Chinese government has a long history of using technology to forcibly erase or alter history. Many Chinese individuals—especially those too young to remember June Fourth—have inaccurate perceptions of the protests in large part due to this conscious erasure. Sources outside of China have been purposely hidden by the Great Firewall, and only inaccurate information is available on the Chinese internet.
Circumventing the Great Firewall has always been a challenge, but it is now becoming near impossible. Accessing unbiased reporting and documentation is thus equally difficult, as Chinese media and search engines must adhere to restrictive regulations. Moreover, when Chinese companies develop digital information tools, they embed CCP censorship directly into their products. For example, when testing whether the popular ChatBot Deepseek would answer questions related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the only response given was, “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” The same message appeared during inquiries into other controversial political events involving China.
The end result is a people who are led to believe they are divided, both from the outside world and from each other, and that past political movements were one-off events rather than part of a mass call for liberation. Pervasive ignorance has been fostered in order to control the image of the CCP and downplay any wrongdoing. Digital freedom is thus imperative to allow individuals to access the truth and end the cycle of misinformation and disinformation.
In Case You Missed It: Other Digital Rights and Cybersecurity News
Great Firewall, Censorship, and Information Control
Xianzi Silenced, Again: Weibo permanently banned the account of Zhou Xiaoxuan, also known as known as Xianzi, the face of China’s #MeToo movement who publicly accused a CCTV host of sexual harassment in 2018, in the latest of multiple platform silencings that authorities have imposed on her since her case was dismissed by a court in 2022.
HRIC on Twitter/X: VIGINUM (France’s service for vigilance and protection against foreign digital interference) released a report uncovering direct links between 13 multilingual fake news websites and the Chinese state media CGTN (China Global Television Network).
Leaked Documents Show the Success of China’s VPN Crackdown: Leaked documents on cross-border internet traffic from China’s most surveilled region suggest that VPN usage is far closer to a few percentage points of the population than the often-cited 30 percent estimate. This article argues that Beijing’s combination of platform substitution, aggressive technical blocking, and legal deterrence has successfully kept cross-border internet traffic to a minimum and rendered the Great Firewall more effective than widely assumed.
“What Does ‘It’s My Duty’ Mean?” ByteDance Chatbot: “This Content is in Suspected Violation of Terms of Use.”: CDT highlighted an exchange in which ByteDance’s AI chatbot Doubao refused to explain the English phrase “It’s my duty,” a phrase from a viral BBC clip of a student cycling to Tiananmen Square in 1989, returning a “suspected violation of terms” error, illustrating how annual censorship spikes around the June 4 anniversary have now extended to Chinese AI models.
Censoring the Metaverse: The article analyzes how China’s censorship apparatus is being extended into virtual and immersive digital spaces — including VR environments, gaming metaverses, and AI-generated worlds — where authorities face the challenge of applying one-dimensional content moderation frameworks to spatially and socially complex environments where political expression, assembly, and identity can manifest in radically new forms.
CDT’s “404 Deleted Content Archive” Summary for May 2026: May’s most censored topics were dominated by public anger and detailed accountability journalism surrounding the Shanxi coal mine explosion that killed 82—with deletions targeting articles naming officials, documenting falsified safety records, and questioning the State Council investigation—alongside suppression of content about convicted sexual abusers whose sentences were deemed too lenient by the public, and growing censorship of Tiananmen-related content around the June 4 anniversary.
HRIC on Twitter/X: A document titled “VPN Cross-Border Identification System Product White Paper” has recently been circulating online, describing a surveillance system designed by Guoji Beisheng (Nanjing) Technology Development Co. and deployed in colleges and universities to identify and monitor teachers’ and students’ “wall-climbing” behaviors in real time, flagging any access to overseas websites.
Translation: Religion and Red Lines in Chinese Online Literature: The piece examines how Chinese online novelists writing in genres like xianxia (immortal fantasy) and wuxia must carefully navigate state censorship of religious content, including restrictions on depicting Buddhist and Taoist themes in ways deemed superstitious or politically sensitive, illustrating how China’s red lines on religion now extend deep into popular web fiction.
Translation: “The School Where I Work Requires Us to Report Our Social Media Accounts. Should I Keep Publishing on My WeChat Public Account?”: A Chinese teacher’s essay describes being required to carry out informal “troll army” duties requiring them to share and promote pro-government content online, illustrating how schools deputize already-overworked staff as unpaid propaganda labor while also surveilling their personal social media activity.
AI Propaganda and Social Media Manipulation
HRIC on Twitter/X: Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Threads experienced a sudden, large-scale account suspension wave in Taiwan this week, claiming the accounts were “under 13 years old.” This storm began brewing late Sunday night (the 14th) and fully escalated the following morning, impacting politicians, multiple mainstream media outlets, and online creators with millions of followers. The suspensions coincided with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s birthday, leading netizens to initially suspect ulterior motives. Meta later stated that this was a technical glitch in its AI age verification system, not targeted at any specific group or individuals.
Translation: “The School Where I Work Requires Us to Report Our Social Media Accounts. Should I Keep Publishing on My WeChat Public Account?”: A Chinese teacher’s essay describes being required to carry out informal “troll army” duties requiring them to share and promote pro-government content online, illustrating how schools deputize already-overworked staff as unpaid propaganda labor while also surveilling their personal social media activity.
Cybersecurity & Data Privacy
HRIC on Twitter/X: Chinese company Geedge Networks is developing an artificial intelligence technology aimed not just at monitoring dissidents, but at predicting who “might” become a dissident before they take any public action.
HRIC on Twitter/X: A document titled “VPN Cross-Border Identification System Product White Paper” has recently been circulating online, describing a surveillance system designed by Guoji Beisheng (Nanjing) Technology Development Co. and deployed in colleges and universities to identify and monitor teachers’ and students’ “wall-climbing” behaviors in real time, flagging any access to overseas websites.
Digital Transnational Repression
Chinese spies use LinkedIn to target UK officials and military staff: the UK’s MI5 warned that Chinese military intelligence operatives are using an “aggressive” strategy on LinkedIn and other job platforms to target UK government officials, military personnel, and anyone with access to classified information by posing as employees of private consultancies or think tanks and advertising fake foreign policy and defense analyst roles before pressuring recruits to provide sensitive, non-public information.
Related: Chinese spies pose as recruiters to glean state secrets, Five Eyes alliance warns. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance (comprising the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) issued an unprecedented joint bulletin extending the warning beyond the UK, confirming that Chinese intelligence is systematically targeting government, military, academic, and think-tank personnel across all five countries through fake recruitment campaigns on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Upwork.
Chinese activist in UK told by X that abusive deepfakes do not breach rules: Apple Peiqing Ni, founder of the UK-based China Dissent Network, was inundated with bot posts on X containing AI-generated deepfake images portraying her as a drug addict and a victim of street violence after she posted about Tiananmen commemoration activities. X’s automated systems initially ruled the posts did not violate its rules, and the account was only suspended after the Guardian contacted X for comment.
Civil Society & Resistance Under Pressure
HRIC on Twitter/X: Former CCTV journalist Chai Jing’s June 4th program has drawn nearly 500,000 views in three days and sparked rare discussion among young Chinese. Many viewers say they only now realize that 1989 was not just a student movement, but a nationwide democratic uprising in which citizens, workers, nurses, journalists, soldiers, and students stood together for a freer China. The program has revived memories of a lost sense of Chinese civic community and a shared aspiration for freedom and dignity, which repression and censorship have gradually eroded, fragmenting society and weakening bonds of mutual responsibility.
Technological Competition & State Power
Siri AI’s Future in China Unclear Under “One Apple, Two Systems”: Apple’s AI features remain unavailable in mainland China due to its failure to meet regulatory requirements, including safety checks against 31 risk categories topped by “incitement to subvert state power,” leaving Apple lagging competitors like Baidu and ByteDance’s Doubao, with Doubao’s refusal to explain “It’s my duty” serving as a reminder of the political guardrails any AI must clear to operate in the Chinese market.
Chinese-linked hackers targeted U.S., Canadian research facilities for a year, Google says: Google’s Threat Intelligence Group disclosed that a China-linked hacking group it calls UNC6508 covertly stole data from US and Canadian academic, medical, and military research institutions for over two years from September 2023 through November 2025, targeting defense intelligence, Indo-Pacific military strategy, AI, unmanned vehicles, cyber warfare programs, and medical research.
Related: Google sues Chinese cybercrime network that used Gemini to automate scams. Google filed a federal lawsuit in New York against “Outsider Enterprise,” a China-based phishing-as-a-service cybercrime network that used Gemini AI to generate code for over 8,000 fake websites impersonating Google, YouTube, USPS, and financial institutions.
US seizes 13 website domains suspected of Chinese spying: The U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of 13 domains belonging to sham consulting firms that Chinese intelligence agents allegedly used to recruit current and former US government and military personnel with security clearances, one week after the Five Eyes alliance issued a similar warning about Chinese LinkedIn recruitment operations.
Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities: Anthropic accused Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab of running the largest known “distillation” attack against Claude to date, generating over 28.8 million exchanges through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April 22 and June 5, 2026, in an effort Anthropic said was designed to accelerate China’s progress toward its own most advanced AI capabilities.
Translation: How Tolerant is China’s Internet?: Responding to former Global Times editor Hu Xijin’s claim that Chinese society has grown “less tolerant,” blogger Wang Wusi sarcastically argued the opposite, citing Xiaomi’s fatal electric car fires and mass recalls as evidence that Chinese society in fact displays world-leading “tolerance” for corporate negligence and public safety hazards that would provoke outrage elsewhere.