At long last, foreign investors can now invest in China’s VPN Market

Finally, the government of China announced in Beijing that foreign entities can now invest in the ownership of their virtual private network services across their country.  

However, foreign investors can only acquire ownership of up to 50% of China-based VPN companies. This restriction enables China to retain control over local and approved products while offering a meaningful incentive for future investments. 

The policy update also covers changes in the investment caps on information services for different application stores, internet providers, and more. 

This news is a surprise to everyone since China has been fighting foreign VPNs for a long time now, obstructing their appearances inside the country and implanting fines and penalties to users who ignored the banning rules. China’s only problem against VPNs was allowing users to override the great firewall and access foreign sites that should be restricted due to government censorship. 

Despite the new policies implemented by the Chinese government to bring in foreign investments, China will not loosen up its tight control and restrictions over internet access. 

The state will still apply pressure to foreign companies to comply with their policies. 

 

What are the implemented rules given by China to future foreign investors? 

Internet censorship requirements are the number one priority of the Chinese government. They made sure to maintain local servers where user data is saved and be available for the local authorities to access. In addition, they also reminded the investors of the possibility of blocking and reporting users who seem to be using a censorship bypassing mechanism. 

What China wants to achieve through this new policy is to uplift its several service industries. 

Furthermore, the Chinese government is thinking about opening the search engine space on the Chinese internet, paving the way for accessing their tech giants, Tencent and Alibaba. 

China’s Ministry of Industry and IT firm is now drafting specific rules and regulations that would force all Chinese firms to accept the displaying of their rival companies on their search engine results. 

If the Ministry of Industry moves forward along with these new rules and regulations, it will be an unequalled move for the Chinese internet, and one that would make dominating it harder than it ever was.