Testing the Great Firewall of China

Anyone working in IT/networking who has ever attempted to deliver a circuit or web service to China will have probably encountered issues with the Great Firewall of China.

For those who don't know, the Great Firewall of China is part of a government programme known as the Golden Shield Project that aims to block specific Internet content from entering mainland China. They are able to achieve this by setting up firewalls and proxy servers that filter IP addresses at all the main Chinese Internet gateways. A few examples of sites that are blocked in China are: Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.

This can cause real issues if you are trying to deliver content to China via the Internet, which is only set to become more popular with the increase in cloud computing and SaaS.

Unfortunately for many services there is no legitimate way of bypassing the China firewalls (as encrypting traffic or using an external proxy is not always practical) and therefore it is important to do adequate testing before deploying a new service. Thankfully there is a new Firefox plugin that is set to help.

China Channel is open source and offers a free and easy way to test web sites as if you were located in mainland China. This works by temporarily routing your Internet traffic through a proxy server in China, allowing you to complete your testing.

Simply download the plugin, install, and restart Firefox. Now you just have to click "Go" to start China Channel and your Internet browsing will automatically be routed through China.