How the World Got Wired · Two AI Internets

How the Wall Bends

Now I want to come back to something I mentioned in Chapter 17, because it has special relevance here, and because it tells you something about how the modern splinternet actually works that you would not learn from formal descriptions of it.

I told you, in Chapter 17, that some people in China use a kind of software called a VPN — a virtual private network — to get around the Great Firewall and reach the global internet. The Chinese government has been making VPNs harder to use for years, but for most of the past decade, technically skilled people in China could still, with effort, get through.

I did not tell you, however, about what happens during certain politically sensitive periods.

Each spring, China holds an annual political gathering called the Two Sessions — in Chinese, 两会, liǎnghuì. The Two Sessions are when China’s top legislative and advisory bodies meet for about ten days, with the country’s most senior leaders in attendance. It is, in formal terms, the most important political event on the Chinese calendar.

During the Two Sessions, almost no VPNs work in China.

This is not a rumor. People who use VPNs in their daily work have observed it, year after year. Foreign academics traveling in China during the Two Sessions cannot connect to their universities. Foreign journalists cannot reach their editors. Even the most technically sophisticated people — the chief technology officers of major Chinese internet companies, the engineers who built the Chinese internet itself — find that their normal methods stop working for those ten days. Then, when the Two Sessions end, the workarounds quietly start working again.

This tells you something important about the Great Firewall, and about the splinternet in general. The Firewall is not a fixed, permanent thing. It is a tunable system. The Chinese government has built it so that, when political circumstances call for tighter information control, it can be adjusted, in real time, to allow less through. When political circumstances are less sensitive, it can be adjusted to allow more.

This is not how walls usually work. Walls are usually either there or not there. The Great Firewall is different. It is more like a faucet that can be turned, by the state, between very open and very closed.

Stranger still: while the wall is at its tightest, certain commercial users continue to have access. Foreign companies that operate in China — multinational corporations, banks, embassies — have, in many cases, separately negotiated arrangements that allow them to use the global internet from inside the country, even during periods when ordinary citizens cannot. The wall, for them, has private doors.

I am telling you these details — about the Two Sessions, about the commercial carve-outs — because the abstract idea of the splinternet is easy to misunderstand. Most descriptions make it sound like a simple barrier. The reality, on the ground, is more sophisticated. It is a tiered system, in which different users have different levels of access, adjusted in real time to political conditions. It is, in some ways, the most sophisticated information-control architecture ever built. And the AI systems being trained in China — DeepSeek, Qwen, the rest — are part of the same architecture, with their own carefully-tuned constraints.

When you are older, you will sometimes hear American politicians and journalists talk about the AI race against China as if it were a simple competition between two equal teams. It isn’t quite that. It is a competition between two profoundly different systems — different rules about information, different rules about what AI can say, different rules about who has access to what — being run by different governments with different long-term goals. The technical race is real. The deeper race is about which set of rules will shape the AI most of the world ends up using.

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