| Luckily for them, they might benefit from having a "business" Internet link as opposed to a "home" one. Before going to China, I decided to set up a server I could securely tunnel my browsing through. There are many commercial VPN solutions, but I didn't want to pay, and the free options are the first to be blocked. (Though it is an arms-race, and those services are still often usable.) While in China, the SSH tunnel worked well to provide access to blocked sites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and (for some unfathomable reason at that time) Python.org. However, I began to notice that while in my apartment, the connection would periodically close. I thought it was due to high latency or some automatic timeout, but it happened consistently enough to be noteworthy. I took my laptop into work (a building with offices, a private school, and a bank) and tried the same SSH command, and to my surprise, I couldn't reproduce the problem. Later, back at home, I re-ran the same SSH command and browsing habits and I was disconnected within 10 minutes or so. While China wants to control people's access to information, the government also understands the need for businesses to function well. This is why I suspect that residential connections are more heavily monitored and filtered - even if it's all automatic. After all, why would a model citizen require a persistent encrypted connection to a server in the US? [Reminder: this is only one out of a possible billion-or-so anecdotes, so it might not be best to draw conclusions about ALL of China from it.] |