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Friday, November 16, 2012

More Great Firewall Fun

In my previous post sharing some of the recent challenges in using a VPN to get through China's Great Firewall, I mentioned that I expected to find my own situation to be much better or much worse the next morning.

At first, all seemed fine and I was able to use my VPN without much problem. However, later in the day it was almost entirely unusable. And now it seems to be OK again*. My hope is that with the ending of China's 18th National Congress on Wednesday and the unveiling of the new leadership on Thursday that VPN access will not continue to be such a challenge.

So while I have a working VPN connection, here's a photo:

Bridge crossing the Xiang River in Changsha, China

Perhaps you can find some symbolism in it. Perhaps I am just in the mood to share a photo of a bridge.

Whatever the case, I hope to return to more typical posts tomorrow assuming my Internet connection in China is back to "normal".


*Update: Of course just after publishing this, some problems with the VPN connection returned. Ah... time to sleep.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks Brian,

    First time, long time. Just curious, the graffiti on the bridge doesn't seem particularly common in your pictures. How uncommon is graffiti in China on the scale of say, Singapore to Holland?

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    1. The graffiti there caught my eye too. A full answer to this question is a little tricky since it depends on the type of graffiti and a single scale probably doesn't capture many of the differences. I might do a post on this topic later. A quick answer: the style of graffiti I often saw in a European city such as Berlin (I can't remember my impressions of Amsterdam's graffiti) is not at all common in most of the places I've seen in China.

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    2. Very interesting. Thanks, as always!

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