Got the same problem here for a lot of foreign sights and I aren't in a school, a home based connection. Hotmail, cannot connect. www.stuff.co.nz cannot connect. yahoo.com cannot connect.
I guess since GoKunming is hosted in HK its not quite a foreign site...
I do wonder if the GFC is not used just to "ensure harmony and stability in Chinese society" but as a type of protectionism against foreign based internet firms. Weibo and QQ are virtually indistinguishable from Facebook and I bet Facebook (who don't have a "don't be evil" motto) would quite willingly enter China and give authorities access to block users accounts if it meant more $$$. These are Chinese business that profit from the blocking of foreign sites. The same can be said for their mapping sites, baidu, email sites etc etc etc.
Who wins when GFC blocks foreign sites? Chinese businesses...
'Incompetence': Boring compared with all the conspiracy theories above but not an unlikely one. I can get everything via one ISP and Domestic websites only with another. Someone could have been doing 'maintenance' and simply screwed up and if that is the case then it can take time to recover.
Funny, I've just recently been noticing the same thing. And this is my 5th year in Kunming. I used to only have to use the VPN occasionally to get to some very specific sites but lately I have to run the VPN almost all the time just to go to sites that normally aren't blocked.
Still, I am assuming that it is actual blocking and not a slowdown or hop count problem. Sure glad I've got a good VPN but let's hope this is just temporary.
Like someone else mentioned, I even today had to use it to get to GoKunming site.
I think my observation is not completely unfounded and it isn't exactly a dramatic conspiracy theory. Think about it, currently probably the biggest sites that could contribute to Chinese insecurity are western news sites which are almost always bashing Chinas human rights abuses (while often ignoring very similar things in their own backyard). I do realise these are occasionally blocked, but mostly they are free to access.
While the main western sites which are blocked or unreliable are places like youtube, facebook, google docs/map/search. Yet all of these sights have their own policies to stop abuse of their sites and will remove content deemed inappropriate - porn, personal attacks, bad language, anything deemed "offensive content". Hell, try to post on Facebook that you are going to kill the US president and see how long that remains live... there was a story a while back about a guy who was not allowed into the US because he said he was going to "tear up" the US... meaning "party hard" but it was interpreted as a terrorist plot by the CIA... that is clearly government control of these services.
China in turn has a massive internet user base which if their clicks were "given" to western corporations would enrich western (mostly American) companies - essentially sending money out of the country. If the Chinese government was really serious about these sites, they would close down and not allow similar sites in China. But we see weibo, QQ, soku, baidu, etc operating pretty freely.
Why is that if only to keep the millions generated from the advertising from billions of clicks a year in the hands of Chinese business? To me it is clearly a type of protectionism, the same as Frances Common Agricultural Policy or the US passed to use American steel in its big infrastructure projects. I think it is less likely to be someone "screwing up" as they have had rather a long time to sort out the GFC - it should be quite a mature IT system and be fairly good at testing its own blocking services. A more likely scenario to me is that someone wants these western websites to appear to be "unreliable" to customers which will mean they will convert to using the equivalent Chinese provided service.
