Gmail blocked in China

    > No, but they are required for sending email to Gmail

Unless the user is using a web-based email application, like Yahoo Mail, who can route their mail however they want. This would seem to hurt Chinese email providers more than anyone else.

    > a government that

Government is (usually) made of people. These people all want different things. This is as true as the Chinese government as it is of the US government.

A litany of complaints against the Chinese government can go on and on and on, but it's not (anymore) a single person dictatorship, nor is it an obvious kleptocracy despite robust corruption. Its claim of being a government for and by the people stands up to scrutiny, even if its methods and outcomes are oppressive and aren't democratic.

    > rolls tanks against its own citizens

The same way you influence the other one that deploys military-grade/style equipment against its people[1], by attempting to influence members of that government.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-polic...

i didn't rtfa, but this is nothing new, i've been in shanghai since 2007, afaik, google services (including gmail) have been hard to access, it was really after eric schmidt put the assault on china by making things public (circa 2010) that things started to get to really bad. from memory, 50% of the time, google services (search, gmail, apis, compute engine, office apps, etc) would not work back in 2007, in 2010 probably 80% of access would fail, and recently in the past year and a half, it's been almost 99% to now 100%.

i've already started a backup strategy long ago (about 8 months ago) as the frustration was just started to drive me crazy, I migrated all my services to either local equivalents or microsoft (outlook.com), but there's only a matter of time before those perhaps also get blocked.

of similar relation, ever since the snowden leaks, it seems that china has started looking to ban or outright limit foreign technology services used by the china government which is basically almost like everything, the nickname is qu ioe, qu which stands for out/oust, ioe stands for ibm, oracle, and emc.

note that vpn still seems to work, and if you're traveling on a roaming mobile service, you can still access google services (and others like facebook, twitter, youtube), but if you're plugging into the hotel wifi without vpn, good f'ing luck. note that i also work at a foreign national software company in china, the office can access these services uninhibited since we have an mpls to the main office in the valley.

if you're living in china and dependent on foreign services/apis like google then it's really hard because you must have vpn or some equivalent. i suggest even using a jumpbox.

i agree that as a software developer, google is an essential tool, it goes where sometimes stackoverflow doesn't go, but there are true alternatives that aren't local like yahoo, bing, duckduckgo, these are all foreign and work more or less uninhibited, it's just that these companies actually follow local protocol which google outright told the chinese government to fuck off.

Yes! I do know about this! One of the things Mao did which wasn't so bad was bring women into the workplace and breakdown some of the traditional gender barriers in the workplace.

I also know about the hugely chauvanistic social culture, the very traditional "women cook, clean and look after kids, men go out and work" family culture that exists in most places, the huge amount of undocumented domestic violence, a massive prostitution industry and a very weak legal framework through which women can seek redress for pay imbalance, domestic/sexual abuse etc. I also know that there's zero paternity leave, and typically only 3-4 months maternity pay for women, a long history of forced abortions and until 2003 women had to specifically ask permission from their (usually male) boss before they could get married! So yeah, I do know a bit about China's "gender equality" :)