I have been in a couple of meetings in China, and everything always went
smoothly. Arrival process at the airport is one of the moat pleasant
that I've had outside Schengen area in EU. There is a lot of university
and commercial activity on new Internet technology, and going there
gives one typically a very different, fresh viewpoint. I never had any
problems with my VPN and had also direct access to the sites that I use
daily. Its a large country with very large variations in the level of
modernization and infrastructure, e.g., hotel, restaurant and Internet
connection quality can vary quite a bit. Some of my colleagues in the
same lab have also been over there, e.g., the 3GPP security group has
met there several times (and they often deal with topics such as
encryption or anonymity) and the experience was similar.
With regards to the hotel clause I need to say that I'm not an expert in
writing hotel contracts. But I'll just that there are plenty of laws
that one has to obey in every country. Unfortunately, there may not
always be an bulletproof way to avoid getting into problems with
purposefully vague laws. If the authorities really wanted to, I'm sure a
sizable fraction of the IETF could be investigated in many countries
for, say, export of encryption software or just being a crypto expert
(see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov),
reverse-engineering which might be a violation of DCMA (see, e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography#Digital_rights_management),
copyright violations for your personal benefit, building software or
protocols that allow others to violate someone's copyright (we have
several working groups trying to improve P2P technology), or linking to
infringing content*. But for some reason none of us are suddenly scared
about these things. That's because we know from experience that when we
go to a country, we are not suddenly all arrested. I would suggest the
way to resolve our current question is to look for other meetings that
have taken place in China. If operator forums, 3GPP, IEEE, a few major
scientific conferences on our field, etc have successfully met there, I
think we should go as well.
I also strongly believe that political views should not matter for this
discussion. For the record, I'm not happy with the actions of the
Chinese government. But I'm also unhappy with many other governments,
including the one in my own country. If we start blaming a particular
country, there's a lot of blame to go around.
Jari
*) Message to whoever intercepts this e-mail: Naturally, I have not been
involved with any of the listed activities :-)
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