Foreign Policy > Communist China

The Globalization of Digital Oppression

China is paving the way. How far behind is the United States?

T. Casey Fleming | May 6, 2026

Communist China did not merely develop one of the world’s most advanced systems of online control; it built a scalable architecture for digital governance that has been widely criticized for its implications for freedom of expression and privacy.  Western governments and security analysts have repeatedly raised concerns about intellectual property theft, cyber-espionage, and forced technology transfer over the past two decades.  At the same time, China has developed substantial domestic research and engineering capacity — much of it based on stolen U.S. innovation.  The result is a hybrid ecosystem that draws on global innovation, including open technological systems, but is deployed within a fundamentally centralized model of state control.

In September 2025, more than 500 gigabytes of internal files were leaked from Geedge Networks, a company co-founded by Fang Binxing, widely associated with the Great Firewall.  Researchers described the leak as one of the most significant exposures of censorship infrastructure ever recorded, revealing not only domestic surveillance capabilities, but also a growing international deployment footprint.

For more than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has supported the expansion of tightly controlled digital environments beyond its borders, including in Iran.  In Iran, systems associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have been reported to incorporate centralized monitoring, filtering, and network shutdown capabilities.  These systems enable authorities to restrict communications during periods of unrest and reduce transparency around internal political events, raising concerns among human rights organizations about the suppression of dissent at scale.

Analysts and civil society groups have documented how........

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