China’s volunteer programmers work in the shadows to keep the internet free

Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese programmer Chen earns his living working remotely for a Western tech company.

But in his free time, he answers to a higher calling: helping his fellow citizens jump the Great Firewall that blocks them from freely accessing China’s internet.

Chen is a volunteer “maintainer” who helps run V2Ray, one of a number of open-source virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers that are gaining in popularity amid China’s crackdown on commercial VPNs, which are…