Day 8 - Proxy Access To Blog Established

I’ve been having the darnedest time trying to get on line to read and write blogs. It wasn’t until today that I found out that the government blocks blogging altogether as an evil. As far as I understand it, you can get in trouble here if you speak out against the government or any of its factions because there is a concept of reputation – not necessarily of a person, but reputation of the government – that must be preserved at all costs. So, I used an anonymous proxy router to route my web browsing outside of China, and from the foreign country, I was able to access my blog so here I am! You’re technically allowed to post, but reading blogs is blocked. I must stress that it is blocked – that does not mean that it is illegal.



We are learning at Tsinghua University's College of Law (photo above). In classes, we are learning about Chinese intellectual property at a very fast rate. I think the program has done a wonderful job at allocating the burden of us pre-reading the class materials and the professors lecturing on the materials with the presumption that we have acclimated ourselves to the materials before we step into class. I could go into details about the class, but it’s not quite the kind of topic I’d enjoy writing about. I like to keep my law life separate from my real life. Why? Because I feel that people spend too much time putting their energy and identity into what they do for a living. i.e. I am a [fill in the blank] (a lawyer, an architect, a banker, a doctor, etc.) Do you define yourself by what you do for a living? To me that seems lame.

Anyway, lots of things have happened since I got to China, so I’ll separate them into various blog entries by date. So read below to the earlier blogs… I’ll re-create them now.