The Great Firewall (防火长城) is a complex system of technical and human controls on foreign internet access and content constructed from the late 1990s to the early 2000s in China — and refined constantly ever since. In addition to nationally imposed restrictions from the Ministry of Public Security, such as IP blocking (denying access outright to the IP addresses of specific domains), packet filtering (which scours incoming data packets for unwanted keywords), and other technical means, the system involves controls applied by individual internet companies in China, responding to the censorship demands of the leadership. Broadly speaking, these censorship demands are about maintaining what the Chinese Communist Party leadership refers to as “public opinion guidance” — essentially, the idea that thoughts and information must be managed in the Party’s favor in order to maintain social and political stability. 

As internet usage in China increased into the early 2000s, and the global internet became an essential part of social and economic life for hundreds of millions of China, many found ways to work around the controls imposed by the authorities, including using Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, which create links between computing devices and network by using what are called “tunneling protocols,” allowing for the shifting of data from one network to another. By using VPNs and other tools, internet users within China were able to “scale the wall”(翻墙). 

The term “scale the wall” gained popularity in China through the 2000s, coinciding with the rise of VPNs. 

Over the past decade, as Xi Jinping has emphasized governance “in accord with the law” (依法治国), national laws have been increasingly used to give legal rationalization to stringent political controls on content and internet access. Starting in 2017, the government began more stringently applying the standard in the 1996 Interim Provisions of the People’s Republic of China on the Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks (中华人民共和国计算机信息网络国际联网管理暂行规定), which states in Article 6 that “direct international networking of computer information networks must use the international entrance and exit channels provided by the national public telecommunications network of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. No unit or individual may establish or use other channels for international networking.” 

A year-long crackdown on VPNs and cross-border internet access by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began on  January 22, 2017, in an effort to, as the MIIT declared, “clean up and standardize the internet access service market.” Restrictions on VPN use are periodically tightened around important political meetings, as they were during the 2024 “Two Sessions” (两会). 

One of the first newspapers in China to define the term “scaling the wall” was Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报), a leading commercial newspaper, which addressed the practice in 2009. For the piece’s author, there was an ongoing struggle where the “wall” (censorship) grew higher, prompting the development of longer “ladders” (bypassing tools) that helped internet users to access free internet. But the piece never explicitly referred to the “Great Firewall.” 

In 2021, Military Reporter (军报记者), a WeChat account operated by the People’s Liberation Army Daily, a paper directly under China’s Central Military Commission, published an article warning about the dangers of using VPNs and similar software. The PLA account took an alarmist tone toward the use of such means to “scale the wall.” It noted in the piece, which warned of the “political traps” (政治陷阱) in bypassing internet controls, that another name for “scaling the wall” was “breaking through the web,” or powang (破网). Criticisms of the practice of “scaling the wall” by official state media sources, often from the PLA, generally note that this exposes Chinese to subversive ideas such as freedom of speech, and encourages them to spread misinformation.