The “Father” of China’s internet censorship infrastructure, known as the Great Firewall of China, has been caught having to circumvent his own creation after attempting to display a website during a talk at the Harbin Institute of Technology in the Heilongjiang province of China.



According to local reports, Fang Binxing attempted to display a South Korea website, which he said showed the views of South Koreans attempting to build similar infrastructure to China’s firewall, but was blocked by said censorship system. Fang then had to resort to setting up a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the censorship, in full view of the lecture attendees, to display the site.

Using VPNs to effectively make a tunnel through the Great Firewall of China to the outside internet world is a common, but frowned upon, practice used by many within China wishing to access western sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The UK also operates a system of censorship through court-ordered blocks of piracy sites by internet service providers, including the notorious Pirate Bay, which requires users to employ similar techniques such as VPNs to access.

Ming Pao, the Hong Kong-based newspaper, said that the university terminated a planned discussion session after Fang was criticised within the lecture and later resoundingly mocked online for having to circumvent his own creation, labelling it as an embarrassing display of the Chinese mainland’s censorship regime.