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Architect of China's Great Firewall Embarrassed After Needing To Use VPN (shanghaiist.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Fan Binxing, architect of the China's infamous Great Firewall, was put in the embarrassing position of having to use a VPN in front of a live audience when trying to access a blocked web page. Fang Binxing was giving a speech on internet safety at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute Technology. During the speech, he presented a defense for internet sovereignty and used North Korea's own version of the system as a talking point. Things got awkward really fast, however, when he attempted to access blocked web pages hosted in South Korea to demonstrate his point. From there his speech went from being a defense of the Firewall to a demonstration of its stupidity. Unable to access the websites he needed to continue his speech, Fang somewhat unexpectedly resorted to the same illicit tool which all expats in China are all familiar with: the beloved VPN. This raises one question: Is China's Great Firewall that easy to circumvent, or are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens?
Yes and Yes.
Yes it's that easy to circumvent, and yes they are treated differently.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When I was there, it was definitely not easy to circumvent. I tried multiple VPNs, dns tricks, all kinds of things, but my internet coverage was spotty at best. If I tried to go to any western news site for any reason, I'd find my phone either throttled to nothing or completely offline for hours or days.
They seemed to be cracking down on VPN usage via deep packet inspection and/or whack-a-mole with overseas endpoints.
I was there in November of 2014, so I can't imagine things have gotten much better.
I just got back from Beijing last week and used a VPN on my phone without much trouble. Mobile data was quite fast and reliable there. Combined with the VPN, it worked just fine. It was so easy to bypass, it almost makes me wonder why they bother.