Hey everyone,

I know that the CPC are a very strict governing body and have a substantial amounts of rules and legislations, vastly different to little old England. So I ask these questions.

What laws should I be particularly aware of?

Do these rules apply right across China? (I've heard they are slightly more relaxed in Western China).

How are certain laws policed?

Do I need to format my laptop/mobile phones etc. before going to china?

Do they install monitoring software on your devices?

Is it safe to break through the Firewall using anonymous browsing? What is the penalty if you get caught? (I love the internet, and I'm starting to have withdrawal symptoms just thinking about it).

Also, What is it like being English and living under communist ruling?

Thanks

Hello,

I'm not in China yet... However from the research and advice I have already received I will answer what I can. A lot of what I know about the laws will specifically come from Andrew Williamson's Living and Working in China. This book was published 2004 so some bits may be slightly out of date e.g. the gfw was still in its infancy back then and I use my common knowlege here.

It goes without saying but just to clarify the main law as such is you will be subject to Chinese law and you will not enjoy the same protection or rights as the UK.

Foreign citizenship is not a get out of jail free card.

In the event you do get arrested:

You may not be allowed to contact your local Consulate until after being questioned.

Trials can be pending for more than one year.

You are rarely granted bail

You can expect harsher sentencing than in the UK as China takes a much harder line on crime and still practices capital punishment for a wide variety of offences.

That being said... you should have nothing to worry about if you just want to be a normal law abiding citizen! The plus sides to China’s strict legal system is that the crime rate is very low and you may well feel a lot safer than in some notorious British cities.

Do you need to format your laptop/phone?

Certainly not!

Unless you have vast amounts of porn/indecent imagery or have lots of documents covering pro democracy movements/free Tibet etc this will be a pointless exercise.

The authorities may well be strict but they do not have time to trawl through the hard drives on all electronic devices that enter the country. If you are paranoid though you can always encrypt and password protect your info and have it auto delete if the password is entered incorrectly say umm 10 times.

Do they install monitoring software on your devices?

No... They do not install anything on your devices.

However all unencrypted communications via internet or phone can easily be picked up by the authorities or hackers in any country.

Is it safe to break through GFW?

Using the right methods... I should think so! I have done much research on this over the last few months and asked a handful of people who have been teaching in China since last summer. Basically i suggest an open VPN but if dont want to pay and you arnt bothered about how secure your info is then you can use a proxy.

During the Olympics in 2008 many blocked sites and services were temporarily reinstated for foreigners to use. This suggests to me that they are not that bothered if the odd foreigner communicates to his friends via facebook/twitter. I think what the authorities do not want is such websites to penetrate the mainstream Chinese population. However saying that, right now the authorities are probably jitterier about it than ever due to the "Arab Springs".

Proxy servers... these are the most popular and cost free way to get through the gfw and used by many Chinese people. It is also the most insecure way too as your information remains unencrypted and passes through many different servers. Proxies are also very slow because of all the different points the information has to travel through. The authorities can block these with relative ease because the consequences are low. The most well known proxy "Tor" has its exit nodes blocked in most places across China from what I have heard.

At a small cost for a foreigner (this may well be a months wages to the average Chinese citizen) is a VPN (Virtual Private Network). I will not promote any single provider here as it may break rules but there are many VPN rating sites that list and offer customer reviews of different services by searching google.

VPNs... Well if you want detail explanation of what a vpn is I suggest wikipedia. The bottom line is that these are hard for China to block because all banks use these for security and many businesses also use these for security too. Why? Well if so and so company has a patented new device that they want to keep secret but is not even in the development stage... the last thing they need is their main competitor to be monitoring their network stealing all of their research that has cost millions of pounds etc.

This is not to say VPN's are or never blocked.... A VPN by Comodo has been recently blocked to my knowledge along with a few others. That being said if you use a large VPN provider, they will have that many servers with such a vast array of IP addresses it will simply be impossible to block them all and doing so would cause chaos for Chinese business.

Lastly... about the commy ruling, I cannot answer that yet but I honestly don't imagine it being that bad if you are there to teach english.

Hope this helps.

Despite common belief in the west, China is not North Korea.

For a law obiding citizen like myself and probably 99% of teachers who live here, you don't notice any difference. At all.

There is understanding, and then there's just being silly. Don't read into Chinas past too much and assume they haven't grown.

Oh, and use a VPN if you wanna go on Facebook or Youtube.

I think the posters are right. If you're law-abiding you won't get into any trouble. And if you do something wrong, I very much doubt you'll be hauled down the police station, or embarrassed publicly. Instead, a few local teachers might happen to mention in passing 'the time Chinese people go to sleep', or 'foreigners and the internet'. So just be aware of the subtle messages. Would teachers in China agree?

I am native Chinese, and I have lived in London for 10 years then came back to China in 2009, now I am running an English training school here in my hometown Changsha, which is in the capital city of Hunan province, so I guess I can give some advice one this issue.

Basicaly, you won't feel any differences if you are not a big fan of Free Tibet or Falun Dafa. You are free to watch any British TV shows on the internet, to drink with your friends, and to call anyone around the world. The only thing I would like to remind you is that you are not allowed to smoke GREEN here, while some people can smoke it almost legally in the UK.

As stevebudd mentioned in his poster, the local police are more likely to serve you rather than to monitor you, poeple here are extremely friendly towards foreigners, most foreigners live happily but those arrogant ones。

And again, about commy ruling... the only complainment you might have would be like, "Hey! what's wrong with my TV? almost all the channels are showing the same CCTV News programme at 7pm! "Would teachers in China agree?

Haha. CCTV 1 news at 7 on literally 80 channels. So true