WordPress unblocked in China

Something odd is happening on the Great Firewall of China. Last week my VPN service suddenly stopped (I won’t mention the name specifically in case somebody wants to shut them down again). It’s not impossible for the authorities to stop a particular VPN provider: they can just turn off the IP address.  When that happens you can simply get a new IP address, either from that provider or from a different one. It’s very hard for the government to shut down all of them.

But a much more nefarious way to censor is to keep the VPN unblocked, but make it much slower. This makes it nearly impossible for normal users to know how to fix. Is it my current ISP? Is it the VPN provider? maybe the internet is just overloaded right now.  Should I just wait to see what happens?

Here’s my internet speed today from my apartment near Dongzhimen:

 

and here’s my speed when I turn on the VPN:

Meanwhile I just noticed that the wordpress.com domain is unblocked. I can read/write to blogs hosted here.  The Google-operated blogspot domain is still blocked, so this is my only way to publish something without a (fast) VPN.