China Travelogue - The Great Firewall of China

As my cousin Stacy pointed out last week, I have missed my deadline.  I had set the goal of posting at least once a week here for the next year, and then only a few weeks in I missed that goal.  The cause of my shortcoming is a combination of Chinese totalitarianism and my shortsightedness.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China on a business trip.  Although I was aware of “The Great Firewall of China,” this is the first trip where it has completely thwarted my efforts.  “The Great Firewall” is the wholesale, systematic censorship of Internet access within the People’s Republic of China.  From inside China, it appears that a large number of common websites just don’t work.  Attempts to connect to them result in a “connection reset” message, or sometimes the connection simply times out with no response at all.  One of the sites so blocked is blogger.com, where I write this blog.

Reset connection to blogger.com

Timed-out connection to Facebook

There are some ways around The Great Firewall.  Virtual Private Networks or “VPNs” can be used to create an encrypted tunnel between a computer inside the PRC and a portal on the outside, through which (virtually) all network traffic can be passed.  From the user’s point of view, it is like browsing from the far end of the VPN.  There are a few problems with this solution.  The first is speed and bandwidth.  If I have a VPN connection to my home, and I request data from a website, that data has to both go into my home machine, which is limited by my home download speed, and then be sent to me out of  my home over the VPN, which is limited by my home upload speed.  There is also some delay introduced for the VPN server at my home to encrypt the data for transfer over the VPN.  All the traffic passing through the VPN has to traverse the network connection to the VPN server twice.  This can, of course, be overcome by using a fast machine with a really high bandwidth Internet connection, but it still represents a bottleneck.

There are also some more technical VPN issues.  If I’m connected to the Internet at my hotel in China, I need to make sure that the packets required to maintain that local connection to the hotel’s network aren’t shipped out over the VPN.  For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used to get an IP address in most public networks.  It is also used to renew that address when it expires.  If that traffic isn’t left on the local network, then the Internet connection required for the VPN can’t be set up in the first place.

Another work-around is web proxies.  These are similar to VPNs, in that you send your request for a web-page to a server somewhere else, that that server, acting as your “proxy,” requests the web page and forwards it on to you.  That way, the routers filtering traffic from certain sites don’t know where your traffic is originating and let it through unmolested.  There are many free web proxies, but most of them don’t work terribly well, although it wasn’t clear to me if they are simply overloaded, or if China is doing a really good job of blocking them as quickly as the pop up.

To access some static web content you can use a search engine as your proxy.  Microsoft’s “Bing” works pretty well in China, and in several cases I was able to search for some content I wanted to see, and even though those pages were blocked, I could download the cached data from Bing.  This only works for web content that is relatively static, and non-interactive.  And while I could access the Bing cached pages, the Google cache did not seem to work.

It turns out that there is also a way to set up blogger to post anything mailed to a pre-arranged e-mail address.  Since I didn’t set that up ahead of time (my aforementioned shortsightedness), I couldn’t use that on this trip.

So why does China go to the expense and effort of maintaining The Great Firewall?  I think the pretense is to block “objectionable content” from the people of the People’s Republic.  It seems obvious to me that it is an effort to manage the flow of information and control the mindset and mood of the populous.  Above and beyond that, though, there also seems to be some element of supporting SOE’s (State Owned Enterprises) over their foreign competitors.  Although China apparently has a booming social networking industry, Facebook is blocked.  I would love to see the World Trade Organization, which China was so hot to join ten years ago, take a look at this aspect of it.


On future trips, I’ll know to set up more infrastructure in advance.  But for now I’m just happy to be back on the right side of the Great Firewall.