Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot

The Iranian regime used Chinese and Russian technology to silence dissent during recent nationwide anti-government protests, imposing near-total internet shutdowns and disrupting satellite communications to suppress public scrutiny, according to a new study.

On Monday, the international human rights organization Article 19 released a new report examining digital cooperation between China and Iran, detailing Beijing’s role in expanding Tehran’s digital repression apparatus.

“In its pursuit of total control over the digital space, Iran borrows directly from the Chinese digital authoritarian playbook,” Michael Caster, head of Article 19’s Global China Program, said in a statement.

“From Chinese companies embedded inside Iran’s infrastructure, to Iran’s support for China’s ‘cyber sovereignty’ principles based on censorship and surveillance, both countries align in their ambition to disconnect their populations from the open, global internet,” he continued.

According to the report, China has provided material and technical support to Iran since at least 2010, bolstering its surveillance and censorship capabilities as Chinese firms including ZTE, Huawei, Tiandy, and Hikvision continue operating in the country despite international sanctions.

“Emulating China’s infrastructure of oppression helps Iran entrench power, sidestepping accountability and exercising full control over the information environment,” Article 19’s head of resilience, Mo Hoseini, said in a statement. “That way, dissent is not just silenced, it is prevented from ever surfacing.”

The study also explains that Iran is seeking to replicate China’s “Great Firewall” through its National Information Network, a system designed to restrict access to the global internet while centralizing censorship and embedding surveillance deep within national infrastructure.

As international scrutiny over the regime grows, new estimates show that tens of thousands of people were killed by Iranian security forces during an unprecedented crackdown on nationwide protests last month.

Two senior Iranian Ministry of Health officials told Time magazine that as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone. Some reports have put the figure even higher, suggesting the regime could have perpetrated one of the deadliest crackdowns in modern history — all under cover of digital darkness.