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The world has chosen to connect through to each other thanks to the wonders of the Internet and social media networks. The world has now even become reliant on the social media networks, and it has become one of the best ways to communicate. The cloud system has also come in and changed the whole way people interact. However, there are still some countries such as China, which block access to the various popular social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for reasons best known to the Chinese authorities.
There has been a change however in the decision, and slowly the censored content has begun to be available for the people. In fact, the Chinese government has given some foreign educational institutions the permission to host any website they need which means they can get unrestricted access to the Internet just like any other person in a different country.
The Internet regulations which are imposed in China famously coined the ‘Great Firewall of China’ has been in line to regulate and restrict the content that the Chinese government deems to be sensitive and to block the unsupervised social media networks that may incite violence. The block and censorship of these foreign owned social media networks have seen the rise of domestic networks such as Renren, which is seen as a replacement for Facebook, Weibo for Twitter and Baidu for Google.
For those people who do not feel like using these networks, they can always make use of the abundant Virtual Private Networks available on the Internet that can help them circumvent any geo-restrictions in the country. However the government has noticed this trend, and some VPNs have been shut down, but luckily there are plenty more where they came from.
Many of the foreign workers in the country have to rely on these VPN services for their private communication. A recent New York Times survey showed that many of the respondents are hugely frustrated by these restrictions. However, some universities such as the New York University Shanghai managed to receive permission from the Chinese government to view foreign content without any problems or with them connecting to a VPN service.
The university has a unique student body with 51 percent of its students coming from China, and the rest coming from the other countries. Therefore all these people from different aspects of the world meet up and they get to have the same advantages. However, not all students utilize this chances to use the World Wide Web without any restrictions.
Other institutions which have received permission to browse freely include the Duke Kunshan University and the Ningbo Campus of the University of Nottingham.
