I’ve been back in Canada for more than a week now. I had hoped to post more regularly while I was in China, and although my ibVPN.com account worked well at first, once I moved into the dorms at Foshan University, it failed me. In August of last year, China started blocking VPN access in universities. I was aware of this, but hadn’t thought through the fact that I would probably be staying on campus for almost two weeks. The one on-campus exception was a nice little café on the east side of the campus, where they serve espresso coffee at a reasonable price and the WIFI is VPN-unimpeded. Only problem was that the café doesn’t open until 2pm, so for morning access I had to stay in my room without a VPN.

As I discovered, the Great Firewall needed about two minutes to find the ‘kill switch’ for my line, so I was able to sneak peeks into my Twitter account or the New York Times by logging into the VPN, caching the contents and then logging out before getting dumped. I also had three internet devices—iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro—that I could rotate to give me a little more access.

One evening, my patron, Kate Guan, took me to a western restaurant owned by a friend, close to the Foshan Swissotel for dinner. Joining us was Reme (a Taiwanese-Canadian and Kate’s chief ESL instructor), and after about twenty minutes an old school friend arrived who works at the “media agency”. I will call her ‘Ellen’. When Kate asked me if I knew what a “media agency” was, I assumed it was a marketing/advertising agency where they make ads and place them in various media. Kate and Reme laughed and told me that in China, the media agency was the national government’s censor. Ellen is involved with newspaper, broadcast and internet censorship in Foshan. Once this fact was established, Kate and Ellen spoke in Cantonese and Reme quietly interpreted. She was worried about her son, who arrived in the USA to study in a community college, but was having difficulties and wanted to come home. The problem was discussed for a few minutes while I sipped my Tsingtao beer. What Reme was telling me, however, was perplexing.

I was not confused by the fact that Ellen had placed her son in a western school. It isn’t unusual for Chinese Communist Party bigwigs to send their children to the west for higher education. A joke that had been going around Beijing during the recent 18th Party Congress was that the enormous traffic jams and other inconveniences in the city could be avoided if the bosses simply visited their children at Yale and Harvard at the same time. The reason I was perplexed: she wanted her son to experience what it was like to live in a society where one is free to think and say pretty much what one wants. Kate, a Chinese-Canadian who took her daughter to Vancouver and, over time, obtained citizenship for both, appreciated this. I was disarmed by Ellen’s candor. She could tell that I was very interested in her story, and I diplomatically encouraged her to continue.

After graduating from university, Ellen started work at the media agency in 1989. For those of you who don’t know, a major event in Tiananmen Square didn’t happen that year, so it was a busy time and they were hiring. All new employees at the media agency must swear allegiance to the party. Membership is mandatory. I won’t apologize, as some Canadians have, for China’s system of repression. I can’t account for the reasons Ellen came to work for the media agency. I still question the morality of the work she does, but I now understand how someone like Ellen—who may not agree with many of the policies of her central government—nevertheless continues to loyally do her job because it enables her to improve the prospect of freedom for her progeny. I admire her sense of deferred gratification.

The more I learn about China, the less I know!

It was the day after this enlightening encounter that I went online to look at this blog, and was surprised to see that it was unavailable to me.

For me, at home, I can pretty much suss out on my own any problems I might have with the internet. It’s usually a matter of cycling the power on the cable modem and the router, or calling Eastlink if that doesn’t work. On the other side of the wall, things are more complicated: how to know if the problem is with the blog server, the Great Firewall, or local internet conditions? On top of this, I have seen first-hand how some blogs are inaccessible in China, and I do know that because this blog often features YouTube videos, it can be unavailable in China also.

So, like the old saw about bad TV reception in the years before cable-tv… is it my set or yours? Had the Chinese tagged this blog for censorship? Should I ask Kate to ask Ellen if there is anything she can do?

As it turned out, it was unavailable from November 14-23 because the Korean company that hosted the co.cc domains—this blog was identified as ‘leblanc.co.cc’—shut down without warning on November 14. All network requests for leblanc.co.cc came back as unknown. It wasn’t until I arrived in Shanghai for one day before my flight to Canada that I could request Hostgator‘s help in re-assigning the blog to a new domain, which they did within 24 hours (and a small fee of $37.00—well worth it).