Chinese programmer ordered to pay 1m yuan for using virtual private network

Police confiscate ‘illegal income’ of developer deemed to have used ‘unauthorised channels’ to connect to international networks

A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1m yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall”.

The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on 18 August. The notice said Ma had used “unauthorised channels” to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company.

The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan (£120,651) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as “illegal income”, as well as fining him 200 yuan (£23).

Ma said on Weibo that the police had first approached him a year ago, believing him to be the owner of a Twitter account they were investigating.

Ma said the account did not belong to him. “I stated that I was currently working for an overseas company, and my personal Twitter only occasionally liked and retweeted the company’s tweets,” Ma wrote. His post has since been deleted but was archived by China Digital Times.

Ma said the police seized his phone, laptop and several computer hard drives upon learning that he worked for an overseas company, holding them for a month. He was later asked to provide details about his work, his bank details, his employment contract and other information, before being issued with the penalty in August. Ma said he would be appointing a lawyer to appeal against the decision.

Charlie Smith (a pseudonym), the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet censorship in China, said: “Even if this decision is overturned in court, a message has been sent and damage has been done. Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?”

VPNs, which help users circumvent the “great firewall” of internet censorship by making it look as if their device is in a different country, operate in a legal grey area in China. Technically, companies are allowed to use government-approved VPNs for commercial activities. Businesses and universities rely on the software to communicate with international partners.

The government generally turns a blind eye to the relatively small number of individuals who use the technology to access websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and, often, view pornography. But in recent years the government has been making it harder for people to access the VPNs, and in rare cases has punished their use.

Several people have been jailed for selling VPNs. In 2017, a man named Wu Xiangyang was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, and fined 500,000 yuan, for selling the software. In June, Radio Free Asia reported that a Uyghur student, Mehmut Memtimin, was serving a 13-year sentence in Xinjiang for using a VPN to access “illegal information”.

Ma said he only used a VPN to access Zoom for meetings and that most of his work, which uses GitHub, could be done without scaling the firewall.

In discussion about the incident on Zhihu, China’s Reddit-like platform, one user wrote: “If we impose convictions and fines based on this reason, China’s IT industry would basically be wiped out.” The comment has since been deleted.

Ma and the Turkish company he is believed to have worked for did not respond to requests for comment.

The case raised questions that authorities were profit-seeking rather than crime-fighting. In a now-deleted Weibo post, an influencer wrote: “This incident has become an international laughing stock, and the police in a certain place have become synonymous with robbers.”

Local governments in China are laden with an estimated $23tn of debt, which economists see as a brewing crisis in the country’s economy. Already, several municipalities have struggled to pay for salaries and public services and have resorted to creative measures to boost their coffers. In Chengde, the city’s revenues from forfeitures reached nearly 990m yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of more than 7%.

Chengde’s public security bureau did not respond to calls from the Guardian.

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