My memory may be faulty, but as a sometime frequent visitor to Beijing, the uality and usability of the normal hotel wifi and roaming connectivity I experienced travelling there, versus what IETF had was marked. We had a substantively better than normal experience. I didn't test it by deliberately hunting content they might object to like pictures of Winnie-the-Pooh or stuff about TIenanmen square. I am saying that for routine access to google services (often hard) my work mail, SSH to the office and personal hosts, IETF websites, GIT repos, it was fine. >From memory, and without naming anyone because I wasn't party to it, I believe the Academy of Sciences and/or Beijing University and/or Xinghua University negotiated a special for us, and the normal behaviours regarding the GFC didn't apply. Thats not to contradict anyone else, or to imply we had no filter. Whatever we had, was not the normal experience for non-Chinese visiting China, nor the same as Chinese Nationals roaming around in China on different sources of Internet. It has been my experience that as Rob says, the GFC for foreigners isn't a black-and-white ruleset. Some things are redirected internally via DNS, some things work but slowly or with very high packetloss, some things look un-impeded. It very much depends where you are. Visiting the university and MII related functions in the University area I had little problem, being in a hotel or on a conference wifi outside those venues was a shitshow. It used to be an /etc/hosts file could get around the DNS block and redirect. I am less sure this still works. I haven't been back since Covid so this is probably an out-of-date view. TL;DR I do not think IETF Beijing or anywhere else in China would be incapable of performing its necessary IP flows. I do think some people would probably notice a problem, especially if they go looking for blockages. In effect a decision to go or not go is political, not really technical, unless a very long bow is drawn about "no filtering can be considered acceptable" -G
