Head nodding Totalitarian regimes all around the world seem to be handling un-free networks just fine. So does the NSA. Networks do not necessarily embody our values. (Pardon the author rant!)

The Internet is a relatively new thing to China, so is GFW, the rapid upgrade of GFW, iirc, began appeared on somewhere after 2014. Before that, VPNs and Proxies were very stable, and minimal maintenance was required.

To the reason why it looks fine right now, my guess, is that the Chinese community is very much self-sufficient[1], plus, the majority of Chinese readers don't use any other language than Chinese itself. So it might not be about how it was handled, it's about what China is like.

-- [1] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2016/04/%E5%A4%A7%E8%B...

Really interesting. "About what Russia is like" is the short story of this book, and there's huge room for more comparative work on the networks between these two giant socialist states without democracy on the Eurasian steppe. As best I can tell, this book may be translated into Mandarin before it makes it into Russian.

Yeah, and the ruling class in China is not capitalist at all. They are using driving forces of capitalism to achieve something else, and this is not buying Volvo production.

If by fine you mean blocking large chunks of information that could move the world forward all the while charging their tax payers for that privilege then sure it's being handled fine.