You said: "In the US and much of Europe, for example, discussions of techniques for avoiding firewalls or anonymizing traffic are largely considered technical, not political. (Although people might have political reasons for discussing these topics.) The concern is that in the Chinese context, the sets of technical and political topics could be closer, if not overlapping -- that some technical topics might not be overtly political, but might be close enough to cause trouble." This is only my PERSONAL opinion and does not constitute legal or international advice etc, but: Discussion of the topics you cite in your example would be perfectly fine and not cause any "trouble". As I've said previously, our proposed hosts are long-standing contributors and members of the IETF community. They know "our ways" and if they seriously believed that we'd be walking into a danger zone by having normal IETF topics on the agenda they would not have invited us. In due course, the IAOC will be making a statement on our decisions about this meeting. As Ray said, this is expected to occur before IETF 76. Until then, I am going to try to limit posting on this topic since I'm already ranking too high on the Narten score :-) Feel free to ask me about IETF 76 logistics, particularly on the 76attendees@xxxxxxxx list. Cheers, Ole Ole J. Jacobsen Editor and Publisher, The Internet Protocol Journal Cisco Systems Tel: +1 408-527-8972 Mobile: +1 415-370-4628 E-mail: ole@xxxxxxxxx URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf