The Economist

The Economist: Content, Censorship, and Circumvention in China

What The Economist Is

The Economist is a weekly news and analysis publication founded in 1843 by James Wilson. Published in London by The Economist Group, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC, it maintains a global circulation of roughly 1 million print readers and several million digital subscribers. The publication focuses on politics, business, science, and culture, pitched at an educated audience with spending power. Its readership skews toward policymakers, investors, and academics in wealthy nations, though it maintains bureaus across major cities worldwide.

Why It's Censored in China

The Economist has been subject to intermittent blocking and throttling in mainland China since at least the mid-2010s, with intensification after 2017. The blocking is not formally announced but aligns with enforcement under the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and the Internet Content Provider regulations, which grant authorities broad power to restrict foreign media deemed to contain content "harmful to national security" or "state secrets."

Specific trigger points include coverage of Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong's political status post-2020, and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party's governance. When The Economist published investigative features on Xinjiang labor practices (2020) and subsequent analysis of Hong Kong's National Security Law implementation, access became more consistently restricted. The publication's editorial stance—skeptical of state control and attentive to human rights—conflicts directly with CCP information management priorities.

China's blocking differs from censorship in other restricted states: it is not legally codified as a list of banned domains, but rather enforced at the gateway level through infrastructure controls managed by state-owned telecommunications operators (China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile).

Technical Blocking Methods

In China, The Economist's website is primarily blocked through DNS poisoning combined with IP-level filtering. When users attempt to resolve economist.com, DNS queries either return null responses or redirect to dummy addresses. Simultaneously, the IP address blocks associated with The Economist's content delivery network are deprioritized or filtered at the backbone level.

Deep packet inspection (DPI) also plays a secondary role: encrypted traffic to known Economist servers may be throttled or terminated mid-connection. This creates a user experience where the site appears to load slowly, times out, or fails intermittently—a technique that increases friction without being as obvious as a hard block.

Unlike some other restricted regions, China rarely relies on HTTPS SNI filtering alone, though it is technically capable of doing so. The strategy appears designed to make circumvention obvious rather than to prevent it entirely.

User Workarounds

Users in China who access The Economist typically employ tunnel-based circumvention: either VPN protocols (OpenVPN, WireGuard), HTTPS proxies, or Tor. Most choose encrypted VPN tunnels for speed and reliability, though maintenance is necessary as blocking lists are regularly updated.

Anecdotally, readers report that access varies by region within China and by time of day, suggesting imperfect enforcement or deliberate tolerance of limited use. Some users report temporary access via mobile networks during specific hours.

Alternatives

Users seeking similar editorial content in restricted regions may turn to Financial Times (also blocked in China) or The Guardian's international edition (selectively blocked, but less consistently enforced than The Economist). BBC News is accessible via specific mirror URLs in China but remains under regulatory pressure. All three face similar restrictions to varying degrees.

Outlook

Restrictions on The Economist in China have tightened since 2019, not eased. The CAC's expanded enforcement in 2021–2023 suggests the priority on foreign media control is rising. No indicators suggest reversal of policy. Other restricted regions—Russia, Iran—show parallel or worsening restrictions on similar outlets. The technical sophistication of Chinese blocking continues to improve, making user-side workarounds increasingly challenging without sustained effort.