“Sorry, the server has stopped responding” is the message I get after typing www.google.com. The little blue loading bar at the top of the screen has failed to make its way across. I turn on my VPN (Virtual Private Network), connect to Hong Kong, and try again, this time with good results.

The Chinese government has regulated the Internet in China since the early 2000s. Information is both monitored and censored through what is considered the most advanced system of control in the world.  It’s been nicknamed the “Great Firewall of China.”

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google, are inaccessible. The government will block anything it deems threatening, anything that would allow for mass communication. Searching “tiananmen square massacre,” yields no results.

As I was on my way to Beijing for a week, I knew this was going to be a problem.

I left for China on March 14, along with 14 other Upper School students and Upper School history and social studies teachers Jeanne Barr and Kevin Conlon, to participate in a Harvard Model United Nations Conference.

With more than 1,000 high school students from 12 different countries attending, not only were we able to debate and negotiate from the perspectives of our assigned countries, but we were also able to meet and converse with students our age from all around the world.

In the end, the Parker delegation as a whole won the Outstanding Large Delegation award; freshman Charlie Moog, myself, juniors Morgan Harler and Evan Hughes, and seniors Sanford Miller and Sam Winick all received Honorable Mentions; and sophomore Grace Buono and juniors Josh Kaufman and Marc Tarshis received Outstanding Delegate awards.

When not in one of the almost 20 total hours of committee sessions, we were able to tour Beijing, seeing sites such as the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square (though from a distance, as it was closed when we went), the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Jingshan Park.

Because of the internet block, though, I wasn’t able to access freely or legally certain sites for the whole trip. It’s not that I missed looking at pictures on Facebook or watching random videos on YouTube, but I needed Google to make up my homework and classwork.

Google Classroom, Google Drive, Gmail–these were all unavailable. Luckily for me and the entire population of China, someone broke through the Great Firewall and made VPNs. This basically let me access whatever I wanted.

So the censorship didn’t turn out to be much of a problem, but it goes to show the length to which people attempt to get free information. People will literally break government laws to access the Internet.

And I did as well.

In the U.S., we take for granted our free internet, assigning homework through Google, getting unblocked news and information, sharing tweets. At Parker, we use the Internet and technology so much that sometimes we forget how easy it is for us to google something and get an answer in seconds. I’m so used to our free internet in America that in China I was willing to pay $12 and bypass government regulation for a week.

But in other places of the world, people have to such things for their whole lives if they want free internet. They have to fight for their right to free information. Even though no one has been arrested for using a VPN, it’s still considered illegal to access the blocked sites, and people have to bypass the government every day in China for something they feel they deserve.