Well, that’s fucked.
This isn’t funny, but I chuckled at the comparetively ridiciously small fine put on top.
The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan (£120,651) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as “illegal income”, as well as fining him 200 yuan (£23).
Seems like they charged him not for using a vpn but for believing he should havw freedom. The vpn was just a way to get him on whateveer they could
He didn’t even really use it for freedom, it claims he just used it for zoom to work for a Turkish company
A “senior China correspondent” that cites Radio Free Asia for anything can probably be safely ignored, especially given her history of articles.
In June, Radio Free Asia reported that a Uyghur student, Mehmut Memtimin, was serving a 13-year sentence in Xinjiang for using a VPN to access “illegal information”.
The way they did so here was actually pretty responsible. They stuck to the facts (that RFA actually said this) and quoted their use of the phrase “illegal information” appropriately
