The article says the lift is only for foreign visitors, and because they plan to turn those parts of Hainan into free-trade zones. Could this be a trial for rolling out the same thing in other places (i.e. SEZs) where foreigners concentrate? Then they could get the benefits of domestic censorship without foreigners loudly posting about how they can't reach Facebook for the next 2 months, and making China look bad.
It’s probably not so much about not looking bad and more about enabling productivity. I’m sure they are getting pushback from many companies which interact with foreign nationals whose work is affected by the GFoC.
I visit China every couple of years. I used to work remotely while I was there, but these days I’ve given up on the idea. It used to be easy, just ssh tunnel to a friendly server and you’re all set. Now they block every technique I can come up with and fuck up the entire connection if you make a wrong move. There are specialist VPN services that still work, but it’s a real pain to figure out which ones work and which ones used to work and are now broken, and you can’t count on anything continuing to work.
With the risk of sounding like a shill, I have been using HMA Pro for almost 5 years now to connect to social networks and Apple's messaging services. Aside from power/local internet outages I have not had issues connecting to "blocked" services.
Yeah, one other thing that works is to use a foreign wireless connection (of course it is carried by ChinaTelecom etc) like AT&T or BT. I've rarely seen those connections blocked, even when hotel/local wired connections and the company VPN were all... "slowing down" for certain sites.
I haven't been to Hainan though so I don't know about any particular issues there.
It works because the local telco is actually relaying the data frames back to the home telco (beyond the firewall) instead of terminating the data session themselves within the firewall.
If you have ssh access to a friendly server you can use shadowsocks. It is easy to set up (no certificates and mucking with firewall rules like VPN), and works perfectly, at least for me.
Last time I tried, ssh worked fine for interactive command line use but got throttled to death if I tried to proxy other traffic through it. It seems like they’re doing traffic analysis to see which connections are acting like VPNs.
> It’s probably not so much about not looking bad and more about enabling productivity. I’m sure they are getting pushback from many companies which interact with foreign nationals whose work is affected by the GFoC.
Anecdote time: I once met a mainland Chinese software engineer who told me that his department pays for a VPN subscription so they can access the uncensored internet for work.
I can imagine it's impacting productivity in a negative way for software. The VPN isn't going to work 100% of the time and when it does not work you will have half of the docs you need not replicated enough on the local internet.
I was told by someone high up in IT, 99% of wealthy mainlanders all use V-P-N. Not going to fool or pull wool over eyes of the intelligent with big money.
China is earmarked Hainan for development as the Chinese Hawaii. Lifting sanctions on Internet access for tourism is a relevant step in that direction. Have a look at President Xi's remarks during the Boao Summit 2018 in Hainan. This will become a very interesting area to watch...
Many high end hotels in Guangzhou already provide internet outside of the GFW. I’m not sure if this is officially sanctioned or not, but it was definitely surprising to me.
Most big tech companies already provide internet outside of the GFW. Microsoft China did st least, I’m sure most others did as well.
China telecom (communist one, not one from Taiwan) provides "private fibre," to HK. Famously, they claim it to be a physical connection, but if you try loading anything blocked by GFW it will still be blocked. And you can't use anything other ethernet/IP or MPLS/IP on it.
Once we were buying private fibre for our office, we asked a technician the "WTF" question. He plainly asked if we want VPN, then he said that you first have to buy private fibre, then run your own VPN over it.
I believe, all big Cos have it that way. I once visited Microsoft's campus for an event. I noticed that "what is my ip" in google.com shows an IP of a noname Hongkong datacentre rental company.
What are they even censoring these days? They have 1st world devices and goods, they have a fairly large middle class that is growing fast and a large investor class, are enough people really drinking the kool-aid there and not really know/believe about things like financial manipulations and whatnot?
I was going to say the same thing, but if you wait for the Cloudflare 502 to come up you can hit "retry for a live version" and get what I assume is a cached version.
Can't access the site either.. would be very interesting if China partially reverses their firewall policies, would not be too surprising because they will surely want to maintain their growth rate, even in the case of an escalating trade war.
