WhatsApp has been miraculously working on some devices in China for two weeks — despite a longstanding government ban on the messaging service.
The government’s initiative is part of a broader blocking of foreign internet platforms (Signal and Instagram included), which has been unofficially nicknamed the «Great Firewall of China».
WhatsApp is not as popular in China as, for example, the local social network WeChat with over a billion users. According to some estimates, the Meta messenger is used by several million people — although it requires the use of virtual private networks. Like most foreign messaging platforms, WhatsApp messages are encrypted and difficult for governments to monitor.
Nevertheless, some residents of Beijing and Shanghai have been given free access to the messenger for more than two weeks, according to Bloomberg — and, interestingly, this happened at the same time that Apple removed WhatsApp and other social media services, including Threads and Signal, from its Chinese app store, responding to Beijing’s order to close additional loopholes in the Internet firewall.