VPN access being disabled in China

I'm using IPSec now without any problems. OpenVPN is blocked.

China has the power to be more selective about what it blocks. For example, Wikipedia is not blocked here (yet). But trying to access an article within Wikipedia on Tiananmen results in a dropped connection. Why China completely blocks entire blocks of ip addresses (like YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress) is not clear to me. There are a number of easy heuristics you could use to block most of what you don't want.

It is ironic to me that a government that preaches a belief in rationality (eg I received a text message last week urging citizens to believe in science and not the end of the world reports) would use censorship instead of rational debate/discussion to counter viewpoints it doesn't agree with.

This sucks for travelers and ex-pats, but for China's future this is a very, very, very big deal.

I lived in Shanghai last year, and Chinese Internet surveillance is unreal. I could use gmail chat to talk about tiananman square, but as soon as I did all of my Google apps would suddenly be unavailable. I can only assume that when i used certain keywords my every chat was being monitored. A VPN was the only way I could access YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and even some Google searches.

But reality is 90% of the young population of Shanghai didn't really care what the "great firewall" did, because EVERYONE used a VPN. I saw more people watching YouTube in China than I do in the states, even though Chinese versions of these platforms exist. Some platforms, like RenRen (Facebook-like but more similar to Russia's VKontakte) were popular, but most just used the US-built versions. Now most of them won't be able to.

This absolutely terrifies me. I was literally minutes away from being on a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing that killed "x" people. Chinese authorities cite incredibly low numbers for a train traveling at 300 km/h. Most non-state observers cited hundreds of deaths. China slowly grew its number from 20-40.

It's illegal for foreigners to talk about the "Three Ts" with Chinese nationals - Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananman Square. But previously the youth learned through their VPNs letting them access the outside world. With that shut down, the government might as well be burning books.

I'm wondering how this effects corporate outsourcing. The company I work has a Chinese development and as center. This has to be behind the corporate firewall so I'm thinking we will just close that down and move to a country that wants to be part of the future.

This is nothing new. They have added more IPs to the VPN blocklist. I have no idea why this is news. This happens several times per year. This cat and mouse game has been going on for years.

Every time this happens it is just a pain in the ass to find a new VPN that isn't blocked.

If you are technical, it is best to just setup your own VPN on linode or amazon. That way you have less problems with blocked IPs.

I used to run a relatively successful internet-oriented startup in mainland China. Having spent most of a decade there since 2001, in fact the majority of my adult life, I considered it home. Unfortunately, the government - who initially woeed me to return to China with a reasonably lucrative scholarship - keeps making shitty decisions that just make it less and less attractive to live in. Increasing levels of internet censorship is one of them, making visas ridiculously hard to acquire (the Chinese consulate in a neighbouring country actually just flat out refused to even discuss issuing a tourist visa, earlier this year) is another.

I really hope the next generation of the communist party sort their shit out. Otherwise, China's basically going to continue breeding vast generations of uneducated, inward looking nationalists and stifling anything remotely like innovation that somehow manages to occur between the cracks. Foreign business professionals and overseas Chinese will continue to view time in China as a non-negotiable sentence of rice wine banquets, pollution, a complete vacuum in the upper-eschelons of conversationalism, a constant redoubling of cigarette smoke, spit, and bad Chinglish.