身在远方素未谋面的朋友：
见信好。
今天写这封信其实也是因为我生活在中国多少年来非常困惑的问题：中国为什么至今不能开放国际互联网？
有人说中国有网络，而且非常发达，微信甚至可以全世界到处支付了。但请大家看看你们在国内能访问世界上的什么国家网站？世界著名的大学网站或者谷歌、油管、脸书这些拥有最丰富免费信息和知识的网站能访问？推特、福克斯、彭博新闻、BBC、CNN这些在国际上最著名的网站新闻能看到吗？为什么中国共产党领导的政府不让中国人自由连接国际互联网呢？
我曾经使用过无界和自由门等翻墙软件，但是软件使用并不稳定，时常掉线而且访问的网站也受到限制，偶尔我还发现不用梯子，我也能访问个别台湾的网站，甚至美国白宫网站偶然也若隐若现，能看到目录，但是却不能继续打开目录的内容。
根据国际组织监测，目前全球范围内对国际互联网实施全面或高度严格封锁的国家主要包括中国、朝鲜、伊朗、叙利亚、土库曼斯坦、古巴、厄立特里亚等少数国家。在自由之家（Freedom House）等组织的互联网自由度报告中，中国常年位列全球倒数，言论自由度排名也长期处于世界末尾（2025-2026年相关指数中，与朝鲜、伊朗等并列）。 这非常让人困惑。中国不是有年年让人赞叹的GDP增长吗？中国不是有科技遥遥领先的天宫号太空站吗？中国不是有让人艳羡的跨海大桥、机场高楼、东风三号洲际导弹吗？为什么中国已经拥有全世界第二的经济总量，却还不敢开放国际互联网呢？中国领导们的自信在哪里？
是因为开放国际互联网，将使民众轻易接触到被官方教科书刻意淡化或篡改的历史细节吗？比如，中共最初是苏联共产国际经费支持下建立的，中共其实是共产国际的分支，听命于境外势力。中共早期在根据地时期的财政来源也曾涉及鸦片贸易。
另外，中共的军事壮大离不开苏联（共产国际）的资金、武器和顾问支持。1945年苏联将大量缴获的日军装备移交给中共军队，这成为后来内战中中共军队装备改善的关键。早期中共曾承诺建立“民主联合政府”、实现“耕者有其田”等，但在1949年后抛弃承诺迅速转向一党专政，这不就是欺骗吗？其实中共在夺取政权的过程中还有不少令人发指、惨绝人寰的事件至今掩盖。 建国后中共领导下的普通百姓并没有过几天好日子，中共擅长利用群众制造阶级对立。1949-1953年的土改及镇反运动中利用群众斗群众。公开处决、打死、活埋、逼迫自杀、抄家后冻饿而死的死亡人数保守估计达到20万-80万。许多地方实行“村村流血、户户斗争”。数亿亩土地被重新分配，但农民获得分配土地后却很快又通过集体化收归公有。
在中共施行计划生育的国策导致无数怀孕妇女被计生干部强行带走堕胎。甚至农村妇女在怀孕7-8个月时遭强制引产，出生婴儿有时被直接杀害或遗弃。 不少家庭因超生被罚款、拆房甚至拘留。
1989年中共在北京天安门等地对手无寸铁的学生和市民进行了一场血腥的屠杀，仅仅因为他们要求政府打击腐败，仅仅要求政府开放言论和改革。 这次事件中的死亡学生和市民人数至少在三千人以上，但是中国有多少人懂得这段历史？
中共统治下信仰自由也是空话。1999年以来被迫害致死的法轮功学员人数超过5000人。在新疆维吾尔自治区，中国政府2017年以来大规模建立“再教育营”系统，涉及上百万维吾尔族、哈萨克族穆斯林。被拘留者被迫放弃伊斯兰信仰强迫学习普通话和“效忠党”，同时遭受强迫劳动、酷刑和强制绝育。 最讽刺的是中共高层一方面要求民众“为国奉献、艰苦奋斗”，另一方面却疯狂贪腐”闷声发大财”，他们将个人家族资产不断转移至西方社会。这种 hypocrisy（伪善）是政权最害怕暴露的痛点之一。巴拿马文件和国际调查记者联盟（ICIJ）的泄露 文件显示，多位中共高层亲属在英属维尔京群岛等地设立离岸公司，持有巨额海外资产。包括前总理亲属、现任高层家族成员等，通过地下钱庄、离岸金融工具将财富转移到美欧、澳大利亚等地。 他们宣扬“社会主义核心价值观”和“共同富裕”，却让子女情人在西方享受奢华的生活，享受民主自由；自己子女留学名校、持有外国护照，而普通民众连护照办理都受到严格限制。
即使在官方“打虎”行动中，也暴露出权贵阶层惊人的海外和隐秘资产。一些已经公开的案件中官员受贿的金额动就达到上亿的金额，几乎每个贪腐官员背后都有几个甚至几十个情人。 前政治局常委、政法委书记周永康是习近平反腐中落马的最高级别官员之一。其家族及亲信被没收资产价值约14亿美元（约合人民币90多亿元），可这只是冰山一角，还有众多的高层家族通过权力寻租积累了巨额财富。如果开放互联网中国人还可能触及邓家、江家、习家等中共最高层家族的更惊人腐败信息。
显然，关起门来就是为了自说自话，一切政府领导说了算。他们严格控制信息渠道，阻碍民众与世界的自由沟通。任何负面事件——从地方腐败、环境污染、疫情真相，到维权抗议——都能被迅速压制。看看老百姓的生活有多幸福？仅从养老金这一项看，中国农村居民基础养老金2025年前后多数省份每月仅200-300元人民币，大多数农村老人每月领取不足400元，完全难以覆盖基本医疗和生活开支，部分地区甚至出现农村老人生病后”自我了断”的情况。从网上看看台湾：国民年金或劳保年金等每月普遍在数千新台币（约合人民币1000-2000元以上），叠加其他福利后，退休生活质量远高于大陆农村。这种差距却被官方长期隐瞒，充满自信的”党”和”政府”就是不愿意让人们看到境内外人民生活水平的巨大差距。
一边是GDP持续增长的宏大叙事，另一边还出现“全世界大逃亡”的”太平盛世”景象。中国官方GDP数据不断攀升，但大量中国人用脚投票，通过各种途径偷渡逃亡，寻求海外庇护，早就形成一股规模可观的移民与逃亡潮。在2012-2021财年的十年间，中国申请美国庇护总申请量达数万至十余万宗（还有一些偷渡进入美国的中国人并没有申请庇护而黑在美国）。近年来申请量进一步上升：2023财年到2025年，通过南部边境等方式提交庇护申请的中国人数显著增加。在美国处于寻求庇护状态（正在申请或审理中）的中国公民累计超过14万人。而在澳大利亚、加拿大、欧盟以及日本韩国泰国等国家每年同样面对大量的从中国逃亡的庇护以及难民申请者。
其实控制互联网的核心目标就是将十几亿中国人塑造成适合统治的“工具人”和现代奴隶。通过算法推送、爱国主义教育、删除负面信息和封杀异见，培养出对党忠诚、对外敌视、对内顺从的乌合之众。社交媒体上充斥“战狼”式言论，小粉红文化盛行，再现全民热衷学”习”理论的文革景象，只是当年的那”忠”字舞变成了手机上翻飞的学”习”软件变成了小红书而已。可以想像这是所谓改革开放三十年后的国家吗？而这正是长期单向信息操控的结果。
这种洗脑不仅服务于国内统治，更延伸到了国际舞台。 由于关闭互联网，中共可轻易操纵舆论，将民众情绪导向民族主义高潮，用于外交施压、经济胁迫甚至潜在军事冒险。封闭的互联网确保了这种操纵的单向性和高效性。
总而言之，一个正常的国家民众理应当享有知情权、言论权和选择权，更何况是一个充满优越性的盛世和全球”第二强国”？一个国家长久信任与繁荣是不可能建立在欺骗的围城下的。
朋友，阻碍我们获得信息自由的不是领导口中的敌人，也不是美国日本英国，它是谁我们现在心里都很清楚。所以，让我们提出一个问题，习总们你们自信在哪？如果你们坚信中共是一个”光荣、正确、伟大”的党，请开放国际互联网！
只有让人民拥有信息自由的权利，让中国人看到真实的世界，中国人才能真正自信起来，而那时中国才可能成为一个真正自信而负责任的大国，中国人才能真正拥抱灿烂的文明！
祝一切顺利！
自由中国
（以下英文版）
Why Does China Dare Not Open the International Internet?
(Effective ways to break through the CCP’s internet firewall — feel free to download, print, and mail)
Dear friends
far away whom I have never met:
Greetings.I write this letter today because of a question that has long puzzled me after living in China for so many years: Why has China still not opened the international internet to this day? Some people say China has the internet, and it is very developed — WeChat can even be used for payments around the world. But please take a look: what websites from other countries can you actually access inside China? Can you visit the websites of the world’s famous universities, or Google, YouTube, Facebook — platforms that hold the richest free information and knowledge? Can you read news from Twitter, Fox News, Bloomberg, BBC, CNN — the most well-known international media outlets? Why does the government led by the Chinese Communist Party not allow Chinese people to freely connect to the international internet?
I have used software such as UltraSurf and Freegate to circumvent the firewall, but these tools are unstable, frequently disconnect, and the websites they can access are also restricted. Occasionally I have found that without any VPN I could still access certain Taiwanese websites, and even the White House website would appear faintly from time to time — I could see the directory, but could not open the actual contents.According to monitoring by international organizations, the countries that currently impose comprehensive or highly strict blockades on the international internet worldwide mainly include China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Eritrea, and a few others. In reports on internet freedom by organizations such as Freedom House, China has consistently ranked near the bottom globally, and its ranking on freedom of speech has also long remained at the very end of the world (in the relevant indices for 2025–2026, it is listed alongside North Korea, Iran, and others).This is deeply puzzling. Does China not have GDP growth that people marvel at year after year? Does it not have the technologically advanced Tiangong space station? Does it not have the enviable cross-sea bridges, airports, skyscrapers, and Dongfeng intercontinental ballistic missiles? Why, when China already possesses the world’s second-largest economy, does it still dare not open the international internet?
Where is the confidence of China’s leaders?
Is it because opening the international internet would allow the public to easily access historical details that official textbooks deliberately downplay or distort?
For example, the Chinese Communist Party was initially established with funding from the Soviet Comintern; the CCP was in fact a branch of the Comintern and obeyed foreign forces. In its early base areas, the CCP’s financial sources also involved the opium trade.Moreover, the military strengthening of the CCP could not have occurred without the funds, weapons, and advisors provided by the Soviet Union (Comintern). In 1945, the Soviet Union transferred large quantities of captured Japanese equipment to the CCP’s army, which became key to the improvement of the CCP army’s equipment during the subsequent civil war. In its early years the CCP promised to establish a “democratic coalition government” and to realize “land to the tiller,” yet after 1949 it abandoned these promises and rapidly shifted to one-party dictatorship — is this not deception? In the process of seizing power, the CCP also committed many appalling and horrific acts that remain covered up to this day.After the founding of the People’s Republic, ordinary people under CCP rule did not enjoy even a few days of good life. The CCP is skilled at using the masses to create class antagonism. During the land reform and the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries from 1949 to 1953, the masses were used to struggle against the masses. The number of deaths from public executions, beatings, live burials, forced suicides, and freezing or starvation after homes were ransacked is conservatively estimated at 200,000 to 800,000. In many places the principle was “bloodshed in every village, struggle in every household.” Hundreds of millions of mu of land were redistributed, yet after peasants received their allocated land it was quickly taken back into public ownership through collectivization.
The national policy of family planning implemented by the CCP led to countless pregnant women being forcibly taken away by family-planning cadres for abortions. Even rural women who were seven or eight months pregnant were subjected to forced late-term abortions; newborn infants were sometimes killed outright or abandoned. Many families were fined, had their houses demolished, or were even detained for having extra children.
In 1989, the CCP carried out a bloody massacre of unarmed students and citizens in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and elsewhere, merely because they demanded that the government crack down on corruption and open up speech and reform. The number of students and citizens killed in this incident was at least three thousand, yet how many people in China know this history?
Under CCP rule, freedom of belief is also empty talk. Since 1999, more than 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted to death. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, since 2017 the Chinese government has massively established a system of “re-education camps,” involving more than a million Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims. Detainees were forced to abandon their Islamic faith, compelled to learn Mandarin and “pledge loyalty to the Party,” while simultaneously suffering forced labor, torture, and forced sterilization.Most ironically, while CCP high-ranking officials demand that the people “contribute to the country and work hard in difficult conditions,” they themselves engage in frenzied corruption and “quietly make a fortune,” continuously transferring personal and family assets to Western societies. This hypocrisy is one of the regime’s most feared points of exposure. The Panama Papers and documents leaked by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) show that relatives of multiple high-ranking CCP officials established offshore companies in places such as the British Virgin Islands and held enormous overseas assets. This includes relatives of a former premier and members of current high-level families, who transferred wealth to the United States, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere through underground banks and offshore financial tools. They promote “socialist core values” and “common prosperity,” yet allow their children and mistresses to enjoy luxurious lives and democratic freedoms in the West; their own children study at prestigious foreign universities and hold foreign passports, while ordinary citizens face strict restrictions even in applying for passports.Even in the official “tiger-hunting” anti-corruption campaign, the astonishing overseas and hidden assets of the privileged class have been exposed. In some publicly reported cases, the amounts of bribes received by officials easily reach hundreds of millions of yuan, and almost every corrupt official has several or even dozens of mistresses behind him. Former Politburo Standing Committee member and Secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission Zhou Yongkang was one of the highest-ranking officials brought down in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. The assets of his family and confidants that were confiscated were valued at approximately $1.4 billion (over 9 billion RMB), yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. Numerous high-level families have accumulated enormous wealth through power rent-seeking. If the internet were opened, Chinese people might also come across even more astonishing corruption information about the highest-level CCP families such as the Deng, Jiang, and Xi families.Clearly.
closing the door is for the purpose of talking only to themselves, with everything decided solely by government leaders. They strictly control information channels and obstruct free communication between the people and the world. Any negative incident — from local corruption, environmental pollution, and the truth about epidemics to rights-defense protests — can be quickly suppressed. Look at how “happy” ordinary people’s lives are. Taking pensions alone: the basic pension for rural residents in China around 2025 is only 200–300 RMB per month in most provinces; the majority of rural elderly receive less than 400 RMB per month, which is completely insufficient to cover basic medical and living expenses. In some areas there have even been cases of rural elderly people ending their own lives after falling ill. Looking online at Taiwan: the national pension or labor insurance pension is generally several thousand New Taiwan dollars per month (equivalent to more than 1,000–2,000 RMB), and with other benefits added, the quality of life in retirement is far higher than that of rural mainland China. This gap has long been concealed by the authorities.On one side is the grand narrative of continuous GDP growth; on the other is the scene of a “great escape from the whole world” under a supposed “prosperous and peaceful age.” Official Chinese GDP figures keep climbing, yet large numbers of Chinese people vote with their feet, escaping by various means, seeking asylum overseas, and have long formed a sizable wave of emigration and flight. In the ten fiscal years from 2012 to 2021, the total number of asylum applications from China to the United States reached tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand (some Chinese who entered the United States illegally did not apply for asylum and remain undocumented). In recent years the numbers have risen further: from fiscal year 2023 to 2025, the number of Chinese submitting asylum applications via the southern border and other means increased significantly. The cumulative number of Chinese citizens in the United States who are in asylum-seeking status (applications pending or under review) exceeds 140,000. Australia, Canada, the European Union, as well as Japan, South Korea, Thailand and other countries, face large numbers of asylum and refugee applicants fleeing from China every year.
In reality, the core goal of controlling the internet is to mold more than a billion Chinese people into “tool people” and modern slaves suitable for rule. Through algorithmic recommendations, patriotic education, deletion of negative information, and the silencing of dissent, a mob is cultivated that is loyal to the Party, hostile to the outside, and obedient internally. Social media is filled with “wolf warrior” rhetoric, little pink culture flourishes, and a Cultural Revolution-like scene of the whole nation enthusiastically studying “Xi” theory reappears — only that the “loyalty dances” of those days have become the study apps flipping on mobile phones and Xiaohongshu. Can one imagine that this is a country after thirty years of so-called reform and opening up? And this is precisely the result of long-term one-way information manipulation.This brainwashing not only serves domestic rule but also extends to the international stage. Because the internet is closed, the CCP can easily manipulate public opinion, directing popular emotions toward nationalist peaks for use in diplomatic pressure, economic coercion, and even potential military adventures. The closed internet ensures the one-directional and highly efficient nature of this manipulation.
In conclusion, the people of a normal country ought to enjoy the rights to know, to speak, and to choose — let alone a country that claims to be a superior prosperous age and the world’s “second strongest power.” Lasting trust and prosperity for a country cannot be built upon a walled city of deception.Friends, what obstructs our freedom of information is not the enemies spoken of by the leaders, nor the United States, Japan, or Britain. We now know clearly in our hearts who it is. Therefore, let us raise a question: Leaders of the Xi era, where is your confidence?Only when the people are given the right to freedom of information can the Chinese people truly become confident. Only then can China possibly become a truly confident and responsible major power, and only then can the Chinese people truly embrace a brilliant civilization!Wishing you all the best.
Free China
