When I went to the first WordCamps in Beijing and Shanghai in 2009, it was a very different time. They were the biggest in the world at the time! I don’t think you could take photos in Tiananmen Square as freely as I did then; now to visit I think you need an appointment, ID checks, and security checks.
Even during WordCamp, it felt like the freedom of Open Source was in high demand, but it also created a lot of fear. I found out later that one of the student volunteers who helped their professor organize everything had been taken in for hours of questioning following the event.
On that trip, I saw how fine-grained the Great Firewall could be when individual posts (IIRC, about bad milk from a factory harming babies) wouldn’t load, but the rest of the site would. WordPress.com had been totally blocked, taking about a quarter of our traffic at the time, but behind the Firewall, Open Source continued to thrive and grow, and now the frontier open models are being driven by China in a way I never would have predicted!
Once you’ve had a taste of freedom, it’s hard to go back.
