As 2025 attracts to an in depth, CDT editors are compiling a sequence of essentially the most notable content material (Chinese language) from throughout the Chinese language web over the previous 12 months. Subjects embrace this 12 months’s most excellent quotes, studies, podcasts and movies, delicate phrases, censored articles and essays, “Individuals of the 12 months,” and CDT’s “2025 Editors’ Picks.”
This 12 months, CDT Chinese language editors coated 121 studies drawn from all kinds of sources reminiscent of information shops, assume tanks, educational journals, governmental and non-governmental organizations, rights protection teams, citizen journalism collectives, and others. Key matters of curiosity embrace Chinese language digital authoritarianism, press freedom, spiritual freedom, educational freedom, transnational repression, Uyghur human rights, Tibetan human rights, labor rights, ladies’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the Chinese language financial system, democratic techniques of presidency, and extra. Given CDT’s concentrate on Chinese language on-line discourse and web censorship, lots of the studies we highlighted targeted on on-line censorship techniques, the connection between censorship and “stability upkeep,” the growing use of AI in shoring up digital totalitarianism, the position of Western tech firms in Chinese language censorship and surveillance, and the export and diffusion of censorship instruments and norms. A choice of these studies follows, with hyperlinks to the total studies and associated CDT English content material.
The Locknet: How China Controls Its Web and Why It Issues
By Jessica Batke and Laura Edelson, ChinaFile, June 2025
In an interview with CDT (full transcript model), report authors Jessica Batke, ChinaFile’s senior editor for investigations, and Laura Edelson, assistant professor of laptop science at Northeastern College, talk about their collaboration, methodology, conclusions, areas for additional analysis, and rather more. The next excerpt from the report explains the utility of the time period “locknet” as an up to date metaphor for China’s on-line censorship:
The “Nice Firewall” suggests an try at impermeability, a tough, static barrier working alongside the border retaining invading info at bay. However the metaphor fails to seize the size and dynamism of the system as an entire.
[…] In observe, on-line censorship in China features extra like an enormous water administration system: an amalgamation of canals and locks that regulates what flows, by which explicit channels, and at what occasions.
[…] Simply as a system of locks and sluices surrounding a man-made lake can regulate the lake’s water degree whereas tides or rivers move out and in, so China’s on-line censorship system can guarantee the knowledge circulating by the nation’s digital spillways largely conforms to Beijing’s altering whims. The result’s a nationwide intranet that hyperlinks up with the worldwide web however manages inner info flows in accordance with its personal guidelines. The result’s what we’ve got dubbed “the Locknet.” [Source]
China’s AI-Powered Surveillance State and Why DeepSeek Is So Harmful
By Valentin Weber, Journal of Democracy (October and March 2025 editions, respectively)
The discharge of DeepSeek’s AI chatbot in January supercharged the worldwide AI race and amplified issues over using AI to facilitate on-line censorship, surveillance, and propaganda. Two articles from the Journal of Democracy discover present and potential makes use of of AI by Chinese language authorities to implement “stability upkeep,” shore up the surveillance state, and combine generative fashions into current city surveillance infrastructures.
Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, inner paperwork present
By Dake Kang and Yael Grauer, Related Press, September 2025
Drawing on 1000’s of leaked paperwork and inner emails, this investigative report reveals that main American expertise firms usually knowingly supplied the {hardware}, software program, and experience that makes China’s sprawling digital surveillance equipment doable. Through the years, such expertise has been used to trace dissidents and activists, and to facilitate the mass detention of Uyghurs and different ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Some key takeaways from the report:
[American tech companies] offered billions of {dollars} of expertise to the Chinese language police, authorities and surveillance firms, regardless of repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and within the media that such instruments have been getting used to quash dissent, persecute spiritual sects and goal minorities.
[…] U.S. firms launched techniques that mine an enormous array of knowledge — texts, calls, funds, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the web, even water and energy use — to unearth people deemed suspicious and predict their actions. However this expertise additionally permits Chinese language police to threaten family and friends and preemptively detain folks for crimes they haven’t even dedicated.
[…] American surveillance applied sciences allowed a brutal mass detention marketing campaign within the far west area of Xinjiang — concentrating on, monitoring and grading nearly your complete native Uyghur inhabitants to forcibly assimilate and subdue them. IBM brokers in China offered its i2 software program to the Xinjiang police, China’s Ministry of State Safety, and lots of different Chinese language police items all through the 2010s, leaked emails present. One agent, Landasoft, subsequently copied and deployed it as the premise for a predictive policing platform that tagged a whole bunch of 1000’s of individuals as potential terrorists. [Source]
The Web Coup: A Technical Evaluation on How a Chinese language Firm is Exporting The Nice Firewall to Autocratic Regimes
By a number of authors, InterSecLab/Nice Firewall Export investigation, September 2025
The InterSecLab report was one element of the bigger “Nice Firewall Export investigation” primarily based on a leak of over 100,000 inner paperwork and carried out by a consortium of organizations and information shops. It revealed that Chinese language Academy of Sciences-affiliated tech agency Geedge Networks supplied deep packet inspection (DPI) and real-time monitoring instruments to governments in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar, successfully replicating the “Nice Firewall” mannequin overseas. The expertise allowed consumer states to train granular management over web site visitors and monitor cell subscribers, whereas the Chinese language builders benefitted by refining their surveillance algorithms by various international knowledge units. The report warned that this “exporting of digital sovereignty” is making a system of digital authoritarianism that threatens the worldwide open web and facilitates human rights abuses on a transnational scale.
For extra on these matters, see CDT’s Cloud Cowl report on the procurement of Police Geographic Info Methods (PGIS) expertise used to boost state surveillance capability; posts on the home and worldwide growth of Chinese language surveillance tech and the diffusion of censorship norms; how AI is being leveraged for on-line surveillance; using AI in exterior propaganda; CDT’s Sharper Eyes protection from 2019; and different protection from CDT Chinese language.
The US Fee on Worldwide Non secular Freedom (USCIRF) 2025 Annual Report
USCIRF, March 2025
The part on China on this annual report paperwork persevering with spiritual repression in China, as evidenced by harassment and detentions of non secular leaders and believers, authorities insurance policies aimed toward “Sinicizing faith,” and forcibly integrating CCP ideology into numerous features of non secular life, together with Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, and Taoism.
In October, the arrest of dozens of members of Zion Church (錫安教会, Xī’àn Jiàohuì), together with the church’s pastor and founder Ezra Jin Mingri, introduced renewed consideration to the difficulty of non secular freedom in China, significantly to makes an attempt to reign in small, impartial “home church buildings.” The detentions seemed to be in response to the church’s hybrid mannequin of on-line and offline providers, which was itself a response to earlier official strain. Latest years have seen the continuation of a long-running sequence of campaigns to “Sinicize” spiritual observe in China, a aim mirrored in feedback made by Xi Jinping at a September Politburo research session on “Systematically Advancing the Sinicization of Faith in China.” Responding to the detentions of its pastor and followers, Zion Church issued a press release (see the total translation by David Cowhig), one a part of which declared, “We imagine: Religion is just not a criminal offense. Worship is just not a criminal offense. Prayer is just not a criminal offense.” Human rights group Weiquanwang has revealed some biographical info on Jin Mingri and extra background on the detentions.
