China
The People's Republic of China, everyone's favourite communist superpower, operates a major firewall known as the Great Firewall or the Golden Shield, which blocks political, religious, and pornographic sites. Its effectiveness varies dramatically from ISP to ISP and state to state, implying that ISPs run their own filtering as well as the state controlled blacklist, which is the result of ambiguous legislation creating a climate of fear and self-censorship, and in 2005 Freenet 0.5 had the honour of being blocked by Golden Shield (at the sesssion bytes level). Our website has of course been blocked for very many years.
Chinese internet connectivity
Typically users buy a monthly card which allows them between 100 hours (in that month) at 512/128k, and 250 hours at 2048/256; the former seems to be the most common. Contract connections are very unusual although can be faster e.g. 2M/1M. This implies that darknet may have uptime problems, however peak internet time is 5PM-10PM, so uptime may not be a problem. Also China has only one timezone. Emule and torrent clients are widely used and often auto-start on startup, so Freenet's auto-start behaviour is familiar and probably not a big deal.
Also, it appears that Tor public entry nodes are now blocked, and some of the bridges too. This means it is likely that Freenet opennet seednodes will be blocked soon too. See here.
