China’s surveillance and propaganda industries are often depicted as a seamless extension of state power, directed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the top down. Yet the latest leaks from two firms,Geedge NetworksandGoLaxy,reveal something more complex: a commercial ecosystem in which private companies compete for contracts, leverage academic ties, and build sophisticated products to satisfy both ideological demands and market pressures. Their stories show how repression in China is both a political imperative and a profitable business, one that increasingly crosses borders.
Together, Geedge and GoLaxy illustrate how China is not only perfecting digital authoritarianism at home but also packaging it for export – posing deep challenges for democracies in the global race for AI supremacy. Geedge Networks became visible when more than 100,000 internal files were leaked to a consortium of journalists, technologists, and human rights groups. These files included technical specifications, source code, client contracts, and marketing materials that laid bare how Geedge sold itself as a cybersecurity company while actually building censorship and surveillance infrastructure.
GoLaxy, meanwhile, was exposed when researchers at Vanderbilt Universityuncoverednearly 400 pages of internal planning documents – pitch decks, brochures, sales targets, and even complaints from disgruntled employees. Together these leaks have provided an unprecedented window into the mechanics of China’s censorship and propaganda apparatus. The products they sell differ, though they complement each other within the larger control system.
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Geedge is an infrastructure builder. Its flagship product, the Tiangou Secure Gateway, is essentially a turnkey firewall in a box. It performs deep packet inspection, blocks VPNs and other circumvention tools, fingerprints devices, analyzes metadata, and even offers prototype “reputation”-based access controls.
To make these tools accessible to non-technical officials, Geedge layers them with user-friendly dashboards that can show which users are connected, where they are located, and which applications they are running. In effect, Geedge provides the hardware and software to throttle, surveil, and deny information flows across entire networks. Where Geedge builds the pipes for information control, GoLaxy provides the tools to flood those pipes with content aligned to government priorities.
These product differences shape their business models and client bases. Geedge’s model revolves around infrastructure contracts with governments. It sells bundled systems – hardware, software, training, and maintenance – designed to be slotted into telecom backbones or provincial networks.
Domestically, its clients include provincial public-security bureaus, state-owned telecoms, and regional governments, with pilot deployments documented in Xinjiang and other provinces. Geedge has also reached abroad, marketing its “Great Firewall in a box” to regimes that want Chinese-style control. Reports show deployments in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar.
In Pakistan, Amnesty International traced the country’s “Web Monitoring System 2.0” to Geedge technology, noting how it was integrated with Western components to monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic. In Myanmar, Justice for Myanmar has documented how Geedge’s systems enable the junta to censor the internet, facilitating arrests and torture of dissidents. These cases illustrate that Geedge is not merely a domestic contractor – it is a global exporter of authoritarian infrastructure.
GoLaxy’s client roster is narrower but politically significant. The Vanderbilt documents show that its main customers are CCP propaganda departments, state security services, the military, and other government bureaus tasked with “public opinion guidance.” Its business is explicitly designed to serve the party’s narrative goals. Corporate records reporting also suggests ownership ties to state-linked supercomputing and research institutions, ensuring that GoLaxy operates under both commercial and political mandates.
Both companies also maintain close ties to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s premier research institution. CAS-affiliated labs have been documented visiting Geedge’s facilities, while GoLaxy’s staff often hold dual roles at CAS. These connections provide credibility, talent pipelines, and technical resources. They also blur the line between academic research and commercial repression, ensuring that cutting-edge AI techniques developed in state labs flow quickly into products that serve censorship and propaganda.
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