Two Chinese men use their laptop computers at a cafe in Beijing WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images

The "father" of China's Great Firewall was forced to bypass his own creation during a public lecture, according to local media.

Fang Binxing was giving a talk on internet security at Harbin Institute of Technology when he tried to access a website hosted in South Korea. When his own censorship system blocked him, Fang used a VPN to dodge China's firewall.


Hong Kong-based Ming Pao reports that when Fang typed in the address a warning appeared on the projector screen saying the URL had been blocked. He then turned on a VPN in full view of the audience to access the website and continue his talk.

The BBC's news monitoring service found no mention of the news in mainland China, but said it was being widely-shared on social networks such as Sina Weibo.

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Fang, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, is widely credited with playing a key role in China's internet censorship system. He earned a PhD in computer science and lectured at Harbin Institute of Technology before joining China's network emergency response technical team in 1999.

As chief engineer and director, Fang lead the development of China's controversial filtering and blocking system, colloquially known as the Great Firewall of China. The technology is used to block websites such as Facebook, Twitter and any mentions of incidents such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

His key role in the creation of the Great Firewall has made Fang something of a hate figure amongst certain Chinese internet users. In 2011 he was hit by a shoe thrown by a blogger named Hanjunyi.


In a subsequent interview with CNN the blogger said she had thrown the shoe to protest against online censorship. "His work made me spend unnecessary money to get access to the website that is supposed to be free," she said.

Fang cited "health issues" when he resigned from his government post in June 2013.

The Chinese state has continually tried to shut down VPN services that allow people to dodge the firewall, with mixed success. According to recent statistics, 29 per cent of Chinese internet users used a VPN to get online during the last three months of 2015.