However, the words “China,” “technology,” and “finance” have a reputation for being uncertain partners in recent years. I attended a workshop just before leaving for China on the complicated processes that the Chinese government has put in place for the financing and ownership of large-scale joint ventures as it tries to balance its interest in globalization and economic expansion with its equal interest in maintaining a level of control over foreign investment and influence.

The Great Firewall of China

Similarly, the role of Chinese authorities in regulating technology, specifically access to internet information, has been the subject of substantial discussion and comment. Known colloquially in the West as the Great Firewall of China, a series of technological and human mechanisms filters internet information within China, restricting access to certain material based on its content. As a legal research instructor who was teaching American legal research to Chinese law students, I was able to get some firsthand perspectives on how the Great Firewall works—and doesn’t work—in China.

The good news is that I didn’t have any trouble with sports. As I settled into my office, I booted up the laptop that I had brought with me from the U.S. It connected—after a bit of effort—through my Google Chrome browser to my three startup pages: my home university, my email, and a my.yahoo.com page that has my wire services, RSS feeds, and other content. It was May, and both the baseball and basketball seasons were in full swing, along with talking heads on the upcoming football season, golf, tennis, and the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament. I had no problem scanning the headlines and reading selected articles.

News Services Blocked

Accessing news services was more of a challenge. Reuters (one of my RSS feeds) seemed to be completely blocked regardless of the subject of the article, as were The New York Times and The Washington Post. Some colleagues reported that their cable television services provided access to CNN and the BBC, but they would be frequently cut off, then resume, depending on the story being covered.

In my substantive course, I rely heavily on a select number of “free” internet services for legal research instruction, including Google Scholar for scholarly articles, U.S. and international patents, and U.S. federal and state court decisions. Google Scholar, like nearly all the Google content that I encountered, was blocked. Interestingly, I could continue to use Google’s Chrome browser, but I had to reset my choice of search engine—I selected Microsoft’s Bing, which worked well.

U.S. Government Websites

I was somewhat surprised that I had very little trouble using U.S. government websites. In my class, I direct my students to a wide variety of government resources, including govinfo.gov, congress.gov, uspto.gov, uscourts.gov, and websites from a number of federal agencies, including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the U.S. Department of State. I was never blocked or restricted from accessing this content, nor did my students report any problems as they used these services to complete homework and research projects. I had a similar lack of problems with international government organization websites such as those for the United Nations and the European Union.

The university and law school provided access to a robust range of commercial legal and other databases, including Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw, Lexis Advance, HeinOnline, and JSTOR. I had little problem using these resources other than some occasional dropouts in the overall internet service. It was a relatively common occurrence, and from talking to longtime faculty members on campus, it seemed to be attributed to telecommunications system and Wi-Fi infrastructure issues rather than blocking or censorship. I was advised that some content on the commercial services was not available due to licensing restrictions, including on many legal news services.

A VPN

The standard workaround for accessing blocked internet services is the use of a VPN. VPNs were widely recognized and seemed to be well-accepted in the law school community. I opted to use a VPN on my iPad but was not able to access my university VPN on my laptop. For the most part, the VPN provided me with access to content that had been restricted, as well as allowed me to use the Google search engine and access my personal banking and finance services, some of which would not have been accessible from China. The legality of using a VPN in China is somewhat debated, but given the broad comments from law school, expat, business, and other users both in and out of China, it seems to be an accepted solution, at least for non-Chinese users working or traveling in the country.

The impact of the Great Firewall continues to be debated. The Epoch Times suggests that China’s protectionism would likely harm the global economy by disadvantaging U.S. and other firms that operate in China. Barriers to cross-border data access, separation of IT services and data centers, and a lack of reciprocity may serve to impede “all sectors of the economy.” Inkstone reports on a study that found that when a number of Chinese college students were given uncontrolled/uncensored internet access, only a small percentage interacted with uncensored content. The New York Times notes that social media access in China has not resulted in increased attention to “sensitive public issues” but has resulted in some level of vigilantism against “those deemed harmful to the public good.”

For a temporary resident of China, the Great Firewall turned out to be a generally minor inconvenience. But its both spoken and unspoken presence as a fact of life in China could not be ignored.