The Great Firewall of China

Oh, China… The land of children of the dragon, the country Mulan helped saving, the Empire of the Great Walls… What? Plural?

For those of you who don't read the news and knew nothing about it, China has currently two Great Walls. One in that which took over 800 years to be built, which crosses the mountains to the North of the country like a great serpent spreading itself to infinity. The other one, less Wonder of the World and more annoying, is knows as The Great Firewall of China.

China is likely the country in the world that most openly censors the internet. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as sites deemed "dangerous" to the government are completely censored (except in Hong Kong, which is an autonomous regions and as such has their own and more open internet regulations). That means that if a person tries to access any of the websites in the government's "blocked" list, they'll get a "Page not Found" as a result.

That doesn't mean, however, that Chinese people have no access to social networks. They have QQ, which is a mix of MSN, Facebook and e-mail. They have WeChat - their version of Whatsapp - on their phones. They have their own Twitter-like website, called Weibo.

On the other hand, I'm not Chinese and (for now) can't speak Mandarin. And I have friends and family with whom it would be very, very hard - not to say impossible - to keep in touch without using our good old western social networks. Besides, some Google services are also blocked over here. The search engine still workds, Gmail and Google Play work when they feel like it, but Youtube and Blogger - the very same I'm using right now to write this - are completely blocked. So, I had to find the best possible option to dodge the censorship and have access to my favourite websites.

After long and careful research - and some failed attempts - I finally managed to subscribe to a VPN, a program that covers my IP and makes it seem like I'm accessing the internet from some other place in the world. However, there's no such a thing as free lunch, so I had to spend the total sum of 160 dollars to use this program for a year. What I won't do to keep in touch with my friends…

The good thing is that now I at last have free access to the "forbidden" websites. No need to worry - I've been asked -, there's very little risk of being found by the government. In fact, using this kind of programs isn't exactly breaking the law, or at least that's what I was told.