A paper by Ge Chen
Many people still picture censorship in China as something that happens “over there”: blocked websites, deleted posts, and rules enforced inside China’s borders. That picture is increasingly outdated. Today, China’s censorship is not only domestic. It is also transnational in effect, shaping what can be said in other countries, by non-Chinese actors, without always looking like formal “extraterritorial law”.
My recent article asks a simple question: how does a party-state turn domestic speech control into cross-border influence, and do so through law, regulation, and “normal” governance tools rather than just blunt coercion?
The starting point is that China’s speech control has become more systematic in the past decade, tied to legal and institutional changes that place the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) more openly at the centre of the state’s governing structure. This matters because a regime that wants its speech norms to travel needs more than censorship orders. It needs a framework that looks like legitimate regulation with rules, agencies, and a story about why restrictions are “necessary”.
The article traces three legal “routes” through which censorship travels.
Political pressure beyond borders
One route is what many observers now call transnational repression: pressure on dissidents and diaspora communities outside China. This can include intimidation, harassment, and attempts to deter protest and criticism overseas. A striking example discussed in the article is the reported interrogation of hundreds of followers of a prominent online dissident known as “Teacher Li”, which allegedly led to a large loss of followers on X after pressure was applied.
The point here is not only that these incidents happen, but that they sit within an expanding legal infrastructure including national security legislation and laws that explicitly imagine overseas countermeasures. In other words, transnational pressure is increasingly framed as part of “lawful” security governance.
Economic leverage that turns into speech control
A second route is economic. The mechanism is familiar: access to China’s market can be conditional, and those conditions often concern speech. The NBA controversy over Hong Kong is an obvious public example, but the deeper story is structural: global companies learn that compliance is not just about products, but also about how they talk (or do not talk) about China.
The article also looks at how speech-related sensitivities can enter business documentation and risk language, including pressure to avoid “negative” descriptions of China in overseas listings. The result is a kind of “self-censorship by compliance”: firms tone down language not because a foreign court orders them to, but because they anticipate regulatory or commercial retaliation.
Technology, data rules, and AI as censorship infrastructure
A third route is technological. Censorship becomes portable when it is built into data governance and compliance ecosystems — cybersecurity rules, data security regulation, and personal information governance — rather than relying only on blocking content.
The article discusses how China’s data and AI regulation increasingly merges speech control with surveillance capacity, and how rules on emerging technologies (including generative AI) can be used to enforce ideological “values” through technical design requirements.
Across these routes, a key theme is that censorship does not only silence. It also persuades. The article ends by describing a two-track logic: defensive censorship aims to deter criticism and limit access to dissent, while offensive censorship, backed by narratives of stability, growth, investment appeal, and technological competence, aims to promote the claim that authoritarian governance is superior.
Thus, transnational censorship works differently outside of China. It often travels through contracts, partnerships, funding ties, platform policies, business risk assessments, and perceived surveillance. That makes it harder to see, and harder to regulate under traditional free speech doctrine. If the Great Firewall once looked like a national border wall, it now looks more like a passport: it travels through governance tools that other systems recognise as ordinary: law, compliance, risk management, and technology standards. The full article develops this framework in detail and explores what it means for global freedom of expression.
That, in the end, is why the Great Firewall now needs a passport. It may be no coincidence that the U.S. State Department has recently said it is preparing a “Freedom.gov” tool aimed at helping users bypass censorship in places like China and Iran—an indication that “internet freedom” itself is becoming openly geopolitical.
The article How China Curbs Free Speech Beyond Its Borders: Legal Strategies of Transnational Censorship was published in the Journal of International Media & Entertainment Law. Dr. Ge Chen is Associate Professor of Global Media and Information Law and Director of the Centre for Chinese Law and Policy at Durham University. His research focuses on free speech and global constitutionalism, with particular attention to China. He has held academic positions at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Yale Law School, and was previously a research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the EU’s leading China think tank. He is the author of Copyright and International Negotiations: An Engine of Free Expression in China? (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the 2025 recipient of the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression.
