Conceptualizing the reverse great firewall: cybersecurity and the logics of government geo-blocking in China

Abstract China’s Great Firewall originally focused on restricting domestic access to resources on the global web. Today, however, efforts in China and beyond concentrate on restricting global access to information on the domestic internet. This article conceptualizes an emerging “Reverse Great Firewall”: a set of practices through which Chinese government organs restrict foreign access to domestically hosted information. Geo-blocking is core in this development. It argues that geo-blocking emerges from decentralized responses to top-down cybersecurity pressures, shaped by cadre evaluation systems and local discretion. These cybersecurity concerns in China’s context do not just target traditional risks like DDoS-attacks but especially foreign data aggregation, open-source intelligence, and politically sensitive information. Using HTTP/1.1 requests from residential proxies in 14 countries across the world, this study tests the availability of all 13 508 official government websites from China. The results show that >50% of government websites are inaccessible from abroad, with roughly 10% of websites exhibiting explicit and indiscriminate geo-blocking, primarily through either server-side or DNS blocking. The remaining 40% largely reflect network bottlenecks and fragmented infrastructure rather than coordinated policy. Bureaucratically, geo-blocking patterns resemble the fragmented nature of government websites in China, being concentrated in small batches of province and prefecture-level jurisdictions. While the Reverse Great Firewall remains uneven and opaque, it signals a shift in how states may leverage cybersecurity logics to reshape the digital information ecosystem.