LocustlandIt's an Internet crackdown Party, more so lately than usual

While they were discovering their VPN now no longer functioned, the GFW reached an unprecedented height when the New York Times website was blocked.

Bloomberg used to do a lot of business on the mainland much of which has dried up since the Bloomberg News website was blocked this summer as part of retaliation for a report on the hundreds of millions of US dollars in assets held by the family of China's next president, Xi Jinping.

The battering VPN service providers have taken recently was described by one well-known company as "one of the most severe” it has seen in this Wall Street Journal piece which shows how widely such businesses and their users have been affected.

As you can guess, it all has to do with the Communist Party's 18th Party Congress, which began yesterday.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which plays a role in regulating the internet, even announced last month that the internet would be cut off from the rest of the world for the duration of the Party Congress. It turns out that was just a poor choice of words, but when people also started complaining that Gmail had become inaccessible, it didn't seem so far-fetched. 

Those who closely monitor China's neverending neverending campaign against online free speech, such as David Bandurski at the China Media Project and Fei Chang Dao's William Farris, can demonstrate in great detail how companies like Baidu and Sina Weibo have been recruited to assist authorities in their censorship efforts to shut down discussions regarding Politburo Standing Committee hopefuls, former leaders, even mention of the Party Congress itself.