Chinese Tech Offers Blueprint For Iran's Digital Crackdown, New Report Says

A new report by a British human rights group says Iran's system of Internet control draws extensively on Chinese technology, enabling authorities to disconnect the country's 93 million people from the global Internet during the height of January's anti-government protests.

The report, released this week by Article 19, details the policies and imported hardware behind the expansion of Iran's censorship system and describes how surveillance technologies first implemented in China's Xinjiang region against the Uyghur population are now being used in Iran.

Thousands of Iranians were reported killed during the crackdown on the protests, and the country's Internet access has yet to fully recover. What has emerged instead, the report says, is a fragmented but entrenched censorship system developed over decades with Chinese infrastructure and technical cooperation aimed at consolidating total state control over online traffic within Iran's borders.

To examine what this model of cooperation offers Tehran, and the technologies and methods behind it, RFE/RL spoke with Michael Caster, head of Article 19's global China program and a co-author of the report.

RFE/RL: We know technology transfers and the sharing of expertise have been going on at least since 2010, but what have these latest protests and the government's crackdown on them shown us about the nature of this relationship between Iran and China?

Michael Caster: It's true that we have seen documentation going back a decade and a half for technology transfers between China and Iran, but one of the crucial parts of the story that is often overlooked are the terms of the normative framework -- or the strategy of deploying these technologies for really sophisticated digital authoritarian purposes.

So we can't just look at the physical layer of the Internet – the types of middle boxes or tools for deep packet inspection or surveillance cameras in the public space -- as the full picture of what is a digital authoritarian state. We also have to understand the norms and the institutions around their deployment, their use, and normalization.

Let's look at the Internet shutdown in Iran, which is not new on its own. Iran constantly weaponizes the Internet during periods of mass protest to hide its commission of human rights abuses to prevent people from documenting them and communicating with the outside world. But what we've seen in this recent episode is the almost unprecedented level and scope in which they've been able to do it.

So when we look at something like blocking out satellite Internet, which happened with Starlink, it's not just through technology but also through arbitrary and repressive legislation. New rules came into effect following the 12-day war [between Israel and Iran in June 2025] around satellite terminal ownership, then we also have more surveillance drones and also old-fashioned police state tactics of door-to-door sweeps. So it's really that holistic approach, both physical and digital, that is an authoritarian state.

RFE/RL: Whether it's normative or something broader, can we truly say that Iran is following a Chinese playbook? Does the Iranian regime really need tips on how to oppress people, or are we talking about a more concrete Chinese blueprint they're following?

Caster: It's a blueprint that China excels at and has refined at home. States like Iran and others don't need encouragement to be authoritarian, but they can certainly look to the more effective and capable authoritarian influence deployed by China.

We know this because over a number of years we've seen explicit comments from various Iranian members of parliament, ministers, and regulators that have very clearly pointed to the need to learn from China in terms of how it controls the digital domain.

That's noteworthy because in repressive environments that are low capacity, the digital domain is where civil society finds gaps in the infrastructure of control to convene, express, and document. So by gaining that total control over the digital domain through new technologies and tactics from China, Iran is able to exert a new level of control.

RFE/RL: What is China's role with the creation of Iran's National Information Network (NIN), the state-controlled, filtered, and heavily monitored Internet? Is it more of a normative inspiration, or do we know Chinese expertise has played a role?

Caster: This is opaque by design, and you have two quite authoritarian states that are against transparency and accountability. That means some of this has to arrive from contextual analysis and historical narratives. So there is no smoking gun, per se.

But I think we can see that all the way back in 2010, Iran was taking steps to build its NIN. It had been discussed earlier, several years prior to that, but 2010 was really a turning point.

[That] also was the year China published the white paper on the Internet in China, which really articulated what has become quite commonly referred to as a normative framework for states looking to implement this type of centralized authoritarian control over the digital domain, which is cybersovereignty.

That year was also when some of the first large foreign technology transfers between Chinese network infrastructure companies like Huawei and ZTE and Iran were being reported. And this is the type of technology necessary for starting to build out the physicality of a NIN.

So 2010 is really this turning point in terms of Iran taking concrete steps at the same time that China was stepping up technology transfers and developing its own framework. That's continued through the years. Sanctions have made this more difficult, and a lot of analysts have argued that vendors like Huawei have taken a more cautious approach, but it seems like technology transfers are ongoing and we are moving toward the final stages of the NIN, similar to the Great Firewall of China.

RFE/RL: As things started to pick up in late December, and reached a zenith in January with the protests and the crackdown, is there anything that surprised you in the use of digital tools in Iran?

Caster: There are two things that are interesting, in an alarming kind of way. There had been a prevailing strategy to evade past Internet shutdowns by turning to satellite Internet, but this most recent episode has really blasted that notion.

There was an idea -- and not just in Iran -- that satellite Internet was this big solution, but it is not this kind of magic bullet against the weaponization of the Internet. It's a reminder that this is a complicated playing field.

This is largely the result of countries like China and Russia investing heavily in developing counterspace technologies, and we're seeing how there is an exchange of tools and tactics between China, Russia, and Iran on how to perfect digital repression.

This shows how Russian efforts at jamming Starlink in Ukraine dovetail with Chinese technology around GPS jamming and developing its Beidou satellite navigation systems for encrypted signals and locating. At the same time, war gaming in China is looking at new forms of aerial-based satellite Internet jamming, including lots of academic work on how to achieve 100 percent blockage of satellite Internet, related to plans over a possible invasion of Taiwan.

Satellite Internet connectivity is, of course, still a very critical piece of ensuring the right to connectivity, but we are also seeing how authoritarian states are working in concert to develop, test, and learn from one another to prevent access to information and expression in these new frontiers of Internet infrastructure.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.