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China wants you to know it means business on its new censorship rules.

The government has told three telecommunications carriers to completely block users from accessing virtual private networks (VPN) by Feb. 1, 2018, according to a Bloomberg report.

This is huge. Many people in China rely on VPN providers to access information from dozens of popular websites that are blocked in the country. We're talking Google, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, not to mention foreign news sites.

And although China has been talking about shutting down VPN providers for some time now, this latest announcement comes at the internet service provider (ISP) level, meaning users can't simply hop to another VPN provider if their favourite one gets shut down.

The carriers involved -- China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom -- are all state-owned and are the country's biggest operators. That means most users are going to be on one of the three, and will be affected.

A broad sweep across China's connected users

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had earlier pledged in January that it would move to tighten control over VPNs, adding that all VPN services would need to obtain prior government approval.

It said at the time it would embark on a 14-month long campaign to "clean-up" China's internet services.

Chinese internet users had reacted negatively to initial reports of the ban in January.

"How will we declare our love for China on Facebook without VPN?" said one user on Weibo.

"Why are you preventing us from knowing what's on the outside? I really don't understand," another said.

"What about my 483 fans on Instagram??" one asked.

The crackdown is bad news for free speech in China, which recently took a hit after the government moved to ban livestreaming on three major platforms.

According to Stan Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California specialising in Chinese politics and society, China's crackdown is a show of force before the Communist Party's 19th National Party Congress, which is expected to happen in the later half of this year.

The congress will see the next leader of the Communist party be elected, or re-elected. It could explain Chinese president Xi Jinping's emphasis on cleaning up the internet -- his political fate might depend on it.

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