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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?
Blocking 99% is good enough. China is not trying to totally block outside information. They are just trying to keep a lid on organized dissent. Western news publications are commonly available at newsstands, although an occasional story on Tibet, or Xinjiang, or Xi Jinping's offshore bank accounts, will be torn out. Most urban Chinese are better informed about what is going on in the world than typical Americans. China is actually more worried about social networks, where people can organize outside of party control. So Facebook is blocked, and instead they have WeChat and QQ, which are monitored and controlled.
Also, the Chinese Firewall is not "stupid". It may be evil, but it is not stupid. It is very effective at accomplishing its goals.
China has never even tried to implement a classless society. In fact, they did the opposite, by strengthening feudalism and binding the poor to the land. Everyone in China is issued a Hukou identification card at birth, that has their hereditary class printed on it. If you have the "wrong" class, as 80% of the population does, then you can be deprived of public education, housing, and even food. 99% of the 30 million people that starved to death during the Great Leap Forward had low class (rural) hukous. Today, about half the children in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, have no right to attend public school, or go to a public hospital.
One reason that the Chinese and outsiders see the Tiananmen Square incident very differently, is that the protesters never called for reform of the Hukou system. Outsiders see the protesters as heroes standing against oppression. Many Chinese see them as spoiled offspring of the urban elite trying to preserve their privileges.