As 2025 draws to a close, CDT editors are compiling a series of the most notable content (Chinese) from across the Chinese internet over the past year. Topics include this year’s most outstanding quotes, reports, podcasts and videos, sensitive words, censored articles and essays, “People of the Year,” and CDT’s “2025 Editors’ Picks.”
This year, CDT Chinese editors covered 121 reports drawn from a wide variety of sources such as news outlets, think tanks, academic journals, governmental and non-governmental organizations, rights defense groups, citizen journalism collectives, and others. Key topics of interest include Chinese digital authoritarianism, press freedom, religious freedom, academic freedom, transnational repression, Uyghur human rights, Tibetan human rights, labor rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the Chinese economy, democratic systems of government, and more. Given CDT’s focus on Chinese online discourse and internet censorship, many of the reports we highlighted focused on online censorship systems, the relationship between censorship and “stability maintenance,” the increasing use of AI in shoring up digital totalitarianism, the role of Western tech companies in Chinese censorship and surveillance, and the export and diffusion of censorship tools and norms. A selection of these reports follows, with links to the full reports and related CDT English content.
The Locknet: How China Controls Its Internet and Why It Matters
By Jessica Batke and Laura Edelson, ChinaFile, June 2025
In an interview with CDT (full transcript version), report authors Jessica Batke, ChinaFile’s senior editor for investigations, and Laura Edelson, assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University, discuss their collaboration, methodology, conclusions, areas for further research, and much more. The following excerpt from the report explains the utility of the term “locknet” as an updated metaphor for China’s online censorship:
The “Great Firewall” suggests an attempt at impermeability, a hard, static barrier running along the border keeping invading information at bay. But the metaphor fails to capture the scale and dynamism of the system as a whole.
[…] In practice, online censorship in China functions more like a massive water management system: an amalgamation of canals and locks that regulates what flows, through which particular channels, and at what times.
[…] Just as a system of locks and sluices surrounding a man-made lake can regulate the lake’s water level while tides or rivers flow in and out, so China’s online censorship system can ensure the information circulating through the country’s digital spillways mostly conforms to Beijing’s changing whims. The result is a national intranet that links up with the global internet but manages internal information flows according to its own rules. The result is what we have dubbed “the Locknet.” [Source]
China’s AI-Powered Surveillance State and Why DeepSeek Is So Dangerous
By Valentin Weber, Journal of Democracy (October and March 2025 editions, respectively)
The release of DeepSeek’s AI chatbot in January supercharged the global AI race and amplified concerns over the use of AI to facilitate online censorship, surveillance, and propaganda. Two articles from the Journal of Democracy explore current and potential uses of AI by Chinese authorities to enforce “stability maintenance,” shore up the surveillance state, and integrate generative models into existing urban surveillance infrastructures.
Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show
By Dake Kang and Yael Grauer, Associated Press, September 2025
Drawing on thousands of leaked documents and internal emails, this investigative report reveals that major American technology companies often knowingly provided the hardware, software, and expertise that makes China’s sprawling digital surveillance apparatus possible. Over the years, such technology has been used to track dissidents and activists, and to facilitate the mass detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Some key takeaways from the report:
[American tech companies] sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
[…] U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.
[…] American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them. IBM agents in China sold its i2 software to the Xinjiang police, China’s Ministry of State Security, and many other Chinese police units throughout the 2010s, leaked emails show. One agent, Landasoft, subsequently copied and deployed it as the basis for a predictive policing platform that tagged hundreds of thousands of people as potential terrorists. [Source]
The Internet Coup: A Technical Analysis on How a Chinese Company is Exporting The Great Firewall to Autocratic Regimes
By multiple authors, InterSecLab/Great Firewall Export investigation, September 2025
The InterSecLab report was one component of the larger "Great Firewall Export investigation" based on a leak of over 100,000 internal documents and conducted by a consortium of organizations and news outlets. It revealed that Chinese Academy of Sciences-affiliated tech firm Geedge Networks provided deep packet inspection (DPI) and real-time monitoring tools to governments in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar, effectively replicating the "Great Firewall" model abroad. The technology allowed client states to exercise granular control over internet traffic and monitor mobile subscribers, while the Chinese developers benefitted by refining their surveillance algorithms through diverse global data sets. The report warned that this “exporting of digital sovereignty" is creating a system of digital authoritarianism that threatens the global open internet and facilitates human rights abuses on a transnational scale.
For more on these topics, see CDT’s Cloud Cover report on the procurement of Police Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) technology used to enhance state surveillance capacity; posts on the domestic and international expansion of Chinese surveillance tech and the diffusion of censorship norms; how AI is being leveraged for online surveillance; the use of AI in external propaganda; CDT’s Sharper Eyes coverage from 2019; and other coverage from CDT Chinese.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) 2025 Annual Report
USCIRF, March 2025
The section on China in this annual report documents continuing religious repression in China, as evidenced by harassment and detentions of religious leaders and believers, government policies aimed at "Sinicizing religion," and forcibly integrating CCP ideology into various aspects of religious life, including Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, and Taoism.
In October, the arrest of dozens of members of Zion Church (錫安教会, Xī’àn Jiàohuì), including the church’s pastor and founder Ezra Jin Mingri, brought renewed attention to the issue of religious freedom in China, particularly to attempts to reign in small, independent “house churches.” The detentions appeared to be in response to the church’s hybrid model of online and offline services, which was itself a reaction to earlier official pressure. Recent years have seen the continuation of a long-running series of campaigns to "Sinicize" religious practice in China, a goal reflected in comments made by Xi Jinping at a September Politburo study session on "Systematically Advancing the Sinicization of Religion in China." Responding to the detentions of its pastor and followers, Zion Church issued a statement (see the full translation by David Cowhig), one part of which declared, “We believe: Faith is not a crime. Worship is not a crime. Prayer is not a crime.” Human rights organization Weiquanwang has published some biographical information on Jin Mingri and more background on the detentions.
