In a dingy, decrepit apartment in the Ditang residential district in Guangzhou, China, Xioachun Wang watches his favorite YouTube videos, while updating his Facebook profile. Like millions of other Chinese netizens, Wang is using a Virtual Private Network or VPN to circumvent the formidable Great Firewall of China (hint: it’s not made of concrete or steel) to access the web which the rest of the world takes for granted — the free and open web (at least for the most part in Western liberal democracies). But Wang is paranoid. While he wants desperately to get his YouTube fix — there are entire channels devoted to criticizing and condemning the Chinese government, with millions of subscribers — a recent crackdown by Beijing has Chinese netizens, used to passing through the Great Firewall of China at will are now starting to worry when that ease of passage will end.
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