A recent WeChat post reveals that some Chinese schools and universities are using special software to identify and punish students who “scale the wall”—that is, circumvent China’s Great Firewall (GFW) to access overseas websites and portals. The post begins with a not-very-convincing exchange of WeChat messages between three students—identified as “student A,” “student B,” and “student C,” respectively—discussing their university’s use of the ABT Online Behavior Management System (安博通上网行为管理, Ānbótōng shàngwǎng xíngwéi guǎnlǐ) to identify and punish fellow students who circumvented the GFW to access blocked overseas websites and engage in “illegal discourse.” In their conversation, one of the students writes that it was “lucky the school caught the offenders before they ruined the school’s reputation.” The text that follows this exchange reads like advertising copy and praises the various “advantages” of the software.

Below is a partial translation, with some added explanatory links, of the WeChat post. The post includes a statement—ostensibly from a teacher in the university’s department of information management, though it reads more like an ABT product pitch—touting the four “advantages” of ABT’s software:

1. High performance equipment, simple installation. […] Tailor-made for colleges and universities.
2. Cutting-edge capability for identifying 116 types of GFW-circumvention proxy utilities, including popular utilities such as Shadowrocket, Clash, Freegate, and more.
3. A variety of authentication methods to meet the real-name requirements of different clients. […] Utilizes overseas IP-address tracing and real-name registration to accurately pinpoint and “apprehend” violators.
4. Detailed and comprehensive reports, displayed in a separate interface.

How did the school discover which students “scaled the wall” to visit overseas websites? […] The school had installed the ABT Online Behavior Management System, which utilizes reverse IP lookup and real-name identification to accurately pinpoint students who circumvent the Great Firewall.

[…] Universities in various cities and provinces have also issued similar notices. For example, the National University of Defense Technology [in Changsha, Hunan province] issued a notice declaring, “This wall cannot be scaled! Do not test the law,” and Jilin University of Finance and Economics issued a set of “regulations regarding students’ illegal use of GFW-circumvention software.”

[…] What are some university test-cases?

Five universities in Jiangxi province: Thanks to the product’s outstanding accurate proxy-identification capability and robust library of proxy-identifying features, [ABT] successfully won the bid involving both 40Gb/s- and 60Gb/s-bandwidth equipment.

During a test at a certain university in Jiangxi, the Internet Supervision Office reported that a student had used a VPN to circumvent the GFW. ABT’s technical staff worked closely with teachers in the university’s Information Management Office to check the VPN logs and NAT (Network Address Translation) logs on ABT’s Online Behavior Management System, and were able to accurately identify the suspected violator. A subsequent inspection of the student’s computer revealed evidence that the suspect had accessed VPN software and illegal online forums. This efficient collaboration and precise investigation won high praise for our equipment and service from the teachers at the university’s Information Management Office, which not only laid the groundwork for cooperation between our two parties, but also smoothed the path to ABT winning the bid for the project.

[…] In addition to countering circumvention, ABT’s Online Behavior Management System also has sophisticated capabilities for identifying, controlling, and auditing more than 7,000 common software applications such as instant messaging, P2P downloads, stock trading, online gaming, online video-streaming, and more. By combining powerful bandwidth-management features, sophisticated management of network application behavior, and user-friendly logs and other functions, it can help academic institutions and companies alike to achieve visual control and worry-free security. [Chinese]

There is a long history of prosecutions and punishments of individuals in China who use VPNs to circumvent the GFW and access the uncensored Internet. One recent case involved the retroactive administrative punishment of a man in Ningde, Fujian province, for using a VPN back in 2020. In 2023, a programmer in Chengde, Hebei province, was fined three years of “illegal income,” totaling over one million yuan, for using a VPN to do work for an overseas client. VPN-related prosecutions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been even stricter than in other areas: in 2017, a computer science student in Urumqi was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using a VPN to bypass Internet censorship and view “illegal information.” Other double standards abound: in November of last year, current affairs blogger Xiang Dongliang had his Weibo account banned for reporting nationalist pundit and former Global Times Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin for illegal VPN use and posting to overseas websites such as X. (Xiang was punished, but authorities ignored his complaint about Hu’s violation of the law.) In late 2022, CDT translated a censorship directive about a crackdown on censorship-circumvention tools. The crackdown was likely aimed at suppressing news about the nationwide spate of anti-lockdown demonstrations that came to be known as the “White Paper protests.”