Recent activities have demonstrate the government is taking its attempts to an entirely new level, although China has long been locked in a battle to censor the Internet.
But on Thursday, Reuters reported that several popular VPN services were blocked, including Astrill, StrongVPN and Golden Frog.

“This week’s assault on VPNs that influenced us and other VPN suppliers is more complex than that which we have found before,” Golden Frog’s President Sunday Yokubaitis told Reuters.

Percy Alpha from GreatFire.org, an anonymous website that collects data on blocked websites and searches in China, told Business Insider via e-mail that in 2011 the authorities was still allowing popular VPN use slide. The crack down on VPNs is simply another toward the government’s greatest aim – cyber sovereignty.

Alpha said in the previous few months, Internet censorship has found a number of firsts.

“Gmail has never been entirely blocked until end of this past year. This past year, Google has never been entirely blocked until June. “Huge block of merchandises (Line, KakaoTalk, Flickr, Microsoft OneDrive) has never occurred so bunched until June this past year. Last year EdgeCast is never blocked for quite a while until Nov; the block caused a huge number of web site to be blocked.

“Before, censorship was seldom discussed,” Alpha said. “Now it’s warranted by state media.

The recent shutdown, which appears to be primarily changing cellular telephone access, ranges from an easy annoyance for some to a more serious issue for others.

And that problem could escalate. Foreign firms attempting to work in China could be driven out by an entire disruption of all VPN services, Alpha said.

“Now the wall of internet info and communications is too high for young Chinese ?to scale around to remain linked with the remaining part of the planet,” Chen told BI via e-mail. “And miscommunications and misinterpretation of international politics can quickly happen when you just receive one sided advice.”

In a column for SCMP, by adopting more rigorous censorship policies, Chen said, China threats cutting itself off from the remaining part of the entire world.

“The cost the Chinese authorities will pay for its ‘shut-net’ policy may be undetectable for the short term, but will have quite heavy and negative consequences in the really long run,” he said.

Others consider the VPN block is not a big deal, and suppliers will locate to circumvent the block shortly.

An expat who writes the popular Sinocism China Newsletter, Bill Bishop, is a user of Astrill, among the VPN suppliers that went out. Bishop said he’s bought several distinct commercial VPNs to use back up for such issues, which have occurred before.

Bishop said he considers that China is aggressively targeting foreign VPN suppliers because they are being used by more national citizens for Internet access.

“You must recall that the majority of the 600m Chinese Internet users do not care about getting the blocked websites abroad,” Bishop said in an e-mail. “So while this changes expats and some amount of elite, for most folks here this isn’t yet a huge deal.”