{"id":187098,"date":"2015-09-17T22:58:19","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T05:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=187098"},"modified":"2015-09-17T22:58:19","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T05:58:19","slug":"the-best-fathers-day-gift-ever-a-vpn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/09\/the-best-fathers-day-gift-ever-a-vpn\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Best Father&#8217;s Day Gift Ever&#8221;: a VPN"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At The Anthill, New York Times researcher and stand-up comedian <a href=\"http:\/\/theanthill.org\/fathers-day\"><strong>Mia Li describes an unexpected request from her father<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>One Wednesday in early June my father called me at work and said, \u201cI heard it\u2019s going to be Fathers Day soon.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Alarmed, I sat up in my chair and tried to make sense of this. My father had always said that the invented foreign festivals were decoys imported from America to sell cakes and carnations to China\u2019s new middle class gullibles. Even still, in recent years it had become customary for Chinese children to buy their parents gifts on Fathers and Mothers Day. Pressure from both Confucius and the consumer industry had become insurmountable, let alone guilt trips from mum and dad. Starting the year I got a job, each year my mother dropped hints about what gift she wanted (at least she didn\u2019t make me hand over a portion of my salary like some other Chinese mothers do). But my proud father would never ask me for anything, so I thought.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019d like to get you a gift!\u201d I said, in what I hoped was the right response. \u201cWhat would you like?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019d like an Astrill account,\u201d he replied, not skipping a beat. [\u2026] \u201cCan you help me? I definitely need to climb the firewall to keep running my business.\u201d [<a href=\"http:\/\/theanthill.org\/fathers-day\"><strong>Source<\/strong><\/a>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/06\/eu-firms-in-china-bemoan-slow-internet-murky-laws\/\">Foreign firms in China<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2014\/03\/sina-weibo-ipo-lays-bare-censorship-burden\/\">Chinese firms abroad<\/a>, as well as <a href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/04\/chinas-scientific-progress-hinges-on-access-to-data\/\">others such as academic researchers<\/a>, have previously highlighted the burden that China&#8217;s Internet censorship places on them. On the other hand, it has likely <a href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/01\/china-seeks-digital-control-u-n-cpu\/\">helped the domestic growth of homegrown firms<\/a> by sheltering them from foreign competition. Restrictions on circumvention tools have steadily tightened over the past year, with <a href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/08\/great-firewall-reinforced-ahead-of-ww2-anniversary-parade\/\">the latest escalation coming ahead of<\/a> the <a href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/china\/world-war-ii-anniversary-2015\/\">recent World War II victory parade in Beijing<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At The Anthill, New York Times researcher and stand-up comedian Mia Li describes an unexpected request from her father: One Wednesday in early June my father called me at work and said, \u201cI heard it\u2019s going to be Fathers Day soon.\u201d Alarmed, I sat up in my chair and tried to make sense of this. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":962,"featured_media":187100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[116,2,7,14744,14745,14746,100,6,5],"tags":[4531,625,6300,6304,17159],"class_list":["post-187098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","category-economy","category-information-revolution","category-level-2-article","category-level-3-article","category-level-4-article","category-politics","category-sci-tech","category-society","tag-chinese-business","tag-exports","tag-internet-censorship","tag-internet-control","tag-vpns","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.1 (Yoast SEO v24.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;The Best Father&#039;s Day Gift Ever&quot;: a VPN<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/09\/the-best-fathers-day-gift-ever-a-vpn\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;The Best Father&#039;s Day Gift Ever&quot;: a VPN\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At The Anthill, New York Times researcher and stand-up comedian Mia Li describes an unexpected request from her father: One Wednesday in early June my father called me at work and said, \u201cI heard it\u2019s going to be Fathers Day soon.\u201d Alarmed, I sat up in my chair and tried to make sense of this. 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