It seems the information flows to certain populations. I work for an US based company with an office in mainland China. Pretty much everyone in the office knows about the stuff happening in Hong Kong.
I was in mainland China recently. Many tech and manufacturing companies realise they need Facebook and Google to communicate with their customers. So their employees routinely use VPN, even though it's technically illegal.
What’s probably more important is where is the information being published and in what language. If something important is happening, but it’s not in the NYTimes or HN AND in English, I’m likely to miss it.
Not proxied via HQ but there is a VPN of course for things like github, Gmail etc. but point is people are at least to some level consuming the info that is available and not sticking to only mainland based sources. I would imagine certain portions of the population have greater access than most.
