Why China Is Trying to Kill Gmail

In just a few days, Gmail has become largely inaccessible throughout mainland China, even through previously reliable third-party apps, according to reports from inside the country and abroad. Traffic to Google's email service from China cratered to almost nothing late on December 25th and has remained there ever since, according to Google's Transpar​ency report. "We've checked and there's nothing technically wrong on our end," Google's spokespeople told various media outlets, including Motherboard.

Suspicion naturally fell on the censorship-heavy Chinese government. While an official played dumb with Reute​rs, saying she wasn't aware of any blocking (notably not a denial), it's highly likely that the government implemented new blocking measures against Gmail. So why would the Chinese want to stop people from using Gmail?

For starters, Google says its miss​ion is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," which makes it fundamentally opposed to the kind of censorship China has exerted over the internet since the 1990s. Not surprisingly, Google has had a combative relationship with the Chinese government for nearly as long as it has been designing products for Chinese users, almost fourteen years.

Google first built a Chinese-language search interface in 2001, which the government blocked within t​he year. Google didn't officially ente​r China until 2006, under an agreement to comply with local censorship policies and remove certain links from its search listings on Google.cn. That all went to shit four years later, when Google said it would stop censoring results and threatened t​o pull out of China entirely after detecting attempted hacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google didn't come right out and say it, but the implication was the Chinese government was also responsible for those attacks.

YouTube has also been blocked in mainland China sinc​e 2009, along with Facebook and Twitter. And despite the huge presence of Googe's Android mobile software in China, Google's official Play Store only recently opened to Chinese​ developers.

"It's not always a tension between Google and China, but China and its users, who are not only being deprived of more secure and advanced services, but closed to the wider internet community," said Sarah Cook, senior research analyst at Freedom House, an online user advocacy group, in a phone call with Motherboard. Cook notes that some of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA spying have likely only increased suspicions among the Chinese government of non-Chinese services.

For se​veral years now, Gmail in particular has been much slower to access in China than other email services from competing local companies. Last summer, Gmail, along with Google's entire suite of web apps like Maps, Search, Calendar, and Translate, were blocked ​days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, a timing that experts said was certainly not a coincidence.

Since then, Gmail users in China have managed to get around the block by accessing their accounts through third-party apps that rely upon routing protocols like IMAP and POP3. But now those apps and protocols have stopped serving up new emails, according to reports from across China. The only way to reliably connect to Gmail now is through a virtual private network (VPN), which can make it seem as though a user isn't connecting from China. Some have gone so far as to say that VPNs should now be mandatory for doing business online in China, but when it comes to email, that may not actually be necessary: Gmail is still dwarfed in terms of number of users by Chinese email serv​ices, which of course aren't blocked.

So the real question isn't why China's government would seek to block Gmail—given its long history of web censorship—but rather: "why now?"

In the absence of official confirmation, some Chinese Gmail users have their own theories. Brian Glucroft, a user experience researcher and trave​l blogger in China, told Motherboard he suspected that Chinese authorities needed time to close the loopholes for accessing Gmail enabled by third-party apps and protocols. "The question is whether this is something genuinely new or just China cleaning things up," Glucroft wrote in an email sent from Shanghai through Gmail and a VPN. "I lean towards the latter."

Cook, the research analyst, agreed, saying that China has been tightening internet censorship since Xi Jinping took over the presidency in 2013. But she offered another more troubling theory as well. "The Chinese government has a tendency to sentence activists around the time of the holidays," Cook noted. "One thing to keep an eye on is whether this is to pre-empt some action that the government's going to take that they want people not to talk about."

Whatever the reason for the timing, the Chinese government's apparent censorship of Gmail is a clear indicator it views the service as yet another tool that can be used against it by activists and foreign actors. It's also a painfully ironic reminder of how the country with the largest online population in the world has deviated from the fi​rst email its government ever sent back in 1987, which read: "across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world."