Shanghai Underground, Always Online
China’s surveillance infrastructure has reached a scale that stops being political and starts being existential. Facial recognition cameras on every corner, messaging apps that forward conversations to government servers in real time, an internet filtered through what has become the most sophisticated censorship apparatus ever built—the Great Firewall is not a metaphor. It is active infrastructure, maintained by an enormous workforce, updated constantly to close whatever gap the previous patch missed.
Against all of that, a kid in Shanghai with a VPN is not exactly a revolutionary. And yet. i-D spent time with young Chinese artists, designers, and musicians navigating exactly this—using foreign proxies and encrypted apps to reach a version of the internet the rest of the world takes entirely for granted. They follow the same conversations, listen to the same music, look at the same images as anyone else on the planet. The act of doing so is, by definition, illegal.
What the footage captures is less the mechanics of circumvention than the texture of living inside a system designed to make you forget the walls are there. The young people onscreen are not dissidents in the dramatic sense. They are not distributing pamphlets or organizing protests. They are mostly just trying to be part of the world—to see what others see, to say what they mean, to exist on a connected planet without having their connection managed by a government that has decided some information belongs to them and some does not.
The cat-and-mouse dynamic is exhausting to think about from the outside. The state patches a gap; someone finds another. The VPN service gets blocked; a new one appears. The app gets flagged; a different app emerges. This has been going on for years and will continue indefinitely, and the sheer resource imbalance—the entire apparatus of the Chinese state versus a twenty-two-year-old design student with a prepaid SIM—makes the whole thing feel hopeless if you look at it only in terms of who has more power. But that framing misses something. The kids keep going anyway. That stubbornness is not nothing.