Staying In Touch
Once you are here and settled into your
new life you will naturally want to stay in touch with folks back
home. The question is what's the best way and are there any things
you should know?
Skype
Obviously, in the modern world we have
services like Skype but sometimes they don't work very well with VPNs
and Skype connections between China and the west can be pretty
unstable. You will probably want to try them when you want to talk
face to face with someone back home but don't count on them. There
are also reports on the internet that if you use the Chinese version
of Skype it saves the full content of some conversations and makes
that available to official censors.
What else can you use?
One of the most common phone apps in
China is wechat which is Chinese Instant Messaging service, a bit
like a Chinese version of whatsapp. It supports voice and video
calls, audio and text messages, groups, money transfer and a lot of
other bits and pieces. You can read about it on Wikipedia. The other
person does also have to have wechat installed but it's free and (I'm
told) works worldwide on most phones. Whatsapp does work at the
moment but you can't be sure that it won't be blocked in the future
as the Government is constantly changing the list of western sites
that are blocked. Most Social Media applications are blocked and why
whatsapp remains available is a bit of a mystery.
What about Facebook?
Facbook, like many other pieces of
software is blocked by the Chinese Firewall. To access it you must
have a VPN which, though technically not allowed, are pretty much
universally used over here. If you have a VPN and want to use
Facebook to send all your funny stories and photographs to all your
friends I suggest that you set up a secret Facebook Group with just
you and your family and friends as members. You might wonder why not
just a closed group. It's simply that a secret group is much more
secure and you can be more confident that if you post something you
wouldn't want generally read (comments about your school maybe) then
they will only go to the intended audience.
How about email?
How well email works depends on which
service you use. Gmail, like anything connected with Google in any
way at all is blocked but, like everything else usually works with a
VPN. That said, your VPN won't always work. From time to time the
Government has a crackdown and aggressively blocks VPN access.
Usually the VPN services bypass the new restrictions after a few days
but in Febuary and March this year there were over four weeks of
blocking because of the Chinese New Year and the Five Year Plan
Government meetings in Beijing. If you are relying on the VPN to get
you your gmail then, as I discovered, you will be cut off from the
world.
There's a way round it. One of the more
popular Chinese web services (a bit like a much stripped down Chinese
Facebook) is QQ and that has an email service. You can set up a QQ
email account and then set your gmail account to forward everything
automatically to QQ. That's what I've done now so if my gmail is
blocked I can still see my emails there.
Other email services, such as Hotmail,
may work in theory but my experience of them is that they are not
reliable over here so I'd suggest that whichever email service you
use you set up this automatic forwarding to QQ.
What about good old-fashioned letter
writing?
It's possible of course but unless you
want to pay a lot of money for couriered services whether or not mail
ever actually arrives from another country can be a bit hit and miss.
Anything at all that is sent to you MUST be sent by a trackable
method with a tracking number. I once had a parcel from home which I
followed with fascination on the internet as it went to Xi-An,
Chengdu, Shanghai and Beijing twice. I didn't live in ANY of those
cities. It eventually got to me after spending three days getting
from England to China and three weeks getting from Beijing to Baiyin.
Sending things out of the country is a bit more reliable but can be
expensive if you want a quick and guaranteed delivery.
(A small note for UK teachers only. If
you have to send anything to UK Government Departments – such as
the Inland Revenue – you have a small problem. You have to use a
courier service to guarantee it gets there but courier services won't
deliver to PO Box numbers. The Inland Revenue only has a PO Box
address. I had to send the letter to my brother and have him put it
into a new envelope and post it in England.)
*
A list of currently blocked websites
can be found at
