Bets On How Long China Law Discussion List Will be Available In China

This is by no means unusual .. but in 3 years of reading this list this is the first time we’ve seen the following issue

Are freelance China agents , which is normally how it goes, deciding that the content of this list is getting too racy for people to read inside China…

Here’s an exchange from today that suggests that this might be the case.

What is more worrying .. is that it should be considered normal for readers of a China academic law discussion list to have to think about hosting on servers outside China? and that legal academics have to play cat and mouse with China’s authorities

****** mentioned Chinalaw messages going missing. Here are two ways of dealing with the problem.

1. Check the messages archives to see if there are messages you haven’t seen. The archives are accessible here: https://hermes.gwu.edu/archives/chinalaw.html

2. Subscribe to Chinalaw using an address that keeps the messages on a server outside of China (e.g., Yahoo or Gmail). (This is actually a good idea for all your email lists.) Then just go to that account to read Chinalaw messages. If you download emails onto your computer using an email client like Thunderbird or Outlook or Outlook Express, you can easily configure it to retrieve stuff from the Yahoo or Gmail account. Gmail accounts also offer free forwarding to any other account. (You can do this on Yahoo only with a paid account.) If you suspect that messages have been intercepted and deleted in the downloading process, you can always just connect directly with the server hosting your email and check there. (Make sure? you configure it so that it doesn’t delete messages once they’ve been downloaded.)

Those more computer-savvy than I may have other and better suggestions – please contribute if so.