Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider and anti-DDoS specialist Cloudflare has announced plans for a major expansion in China, which will involve 12 Points-of-Presence (POPs) across local data centers.

According to TechCrunch, the US company expects to complete the move in just six months. The new service should help customers improve the performance of their websites, as they venture beyond the ‘Great Firewall of China’.

The name of the mysterious data center partner that will host Cloudflare’s hardware has not been disclosed.

Going east

Cloudflare’s network sits between the website visitor and the customer’s hosting provider. It can improve availability for a website or application, decrease page loading times and protect against several types of cyber attacks.

The company has been criticized in the past for its unwavering belief in the free and open Internet – which for Cloudflare means helping customers share whatever information they like, regardless of how immoral it may be. As a result of this policy, it has provided services to the Muslim Brotherhood, the al-Quds Brigades, LulzSec hackers, credit card fraudsters and online pirates.

Some have also questioned the scale of the DDoS attack against Spamhaus in 2013, which Cloudflare called “the largest DDoS ever”.

CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch the company has been trying to break into Chinese market for the past three years, but its efforts were hampered by the complexities of the local regulatory system. He added that China is already the company’s second largest market after the US, based on traffic and customers.

The new service will help Internet users outside of China access websites that have been blocked by the government – but it will not challenge state censorship within the country.

The company also plans to open an Asian office in the first half of 2015, to be located either on mainland China or in Hong Kong, where Cloudflare recently helped support the pro-democratic protests.

It remains to be seen whether Chinese authorities will be as receptive to the idea of ‘online freedom’ as their western counterparts.