Do circumvention tools promote democratic values? Exploring the correlates of anticensorship technology adoption in China

China is one of the world’s most sophisticated Internet censoring countries. Chinese Internet users who wish to visit blocked Web sites will have to use circumvention tools to get around the Great Firewall, a censoring system inspecting, filtering, and blocking foreign Web sites outside China. Using a nationally representative survey dataset, this study compares circumvention tool users and nonusers in terms of demographic features, Internet-use motivation, levels of media trust, and, most importantly, political attitude and behavior differences. We found that more than 11% of Chinese Internet users had ever used circumvention tools and they were most likely to be young and well-educated. Compared to nonusers, circumvention tool users were more likely to oppose censorship, to place less trust in news media, and to participate more actively in civic activities. However, circumvention tool users tend to hold more politically conservative attitudes than nonusers.