Veering away from totalizing assumptions of digital authoritarianism, this article theorizes China's Great Firewall as a porous digital border, showing how ordinary users employ virtual private networks (VPNs) to access blocked platforms in their everyday lives despite an entrenched censorship regime. Grounded in critical scholarship on digital borders and Internet studies, this article draws on thirty-two semi-structured interviews to examine the complex processes, experiences, and meanings of everyday VPN use. It shows how digital border-crossing through VPN use simultaneously challenges and reproduces the bordering logic underpinning the Chinese Internet, and how authoritarianism is rearticulated in fragmented, non-totalizing, and embodied ways.
