I have also noticed some extra "latency" in the internet in recent weeks (okay - actually a lot ...), starting towards the end of September. I've not been in Beijing all the time since then, but it doesn't seem to have gotten any worse (for me at least) in the last few days. I suspect that this is related to the October Party Congress meeting, but we know from experience that it doesn't take a lot to spook the authorities here into turning up the internet filtering dial to "11" (someone with artistic talents - that rules me out - could make a great cartoon of this).

Basically these days I run a VPN most of the time. Without it searches on Google sometimes work, sometime don't. More than that, many websites these days have code that makes active calls to Twitter, and Facebook (for tracking purposes), so that even though I don't use these sites page-loading is slowed down (and in some cases hangs completely). Similar for sites that use "Googleapis" to track page-hits.

On the other hand, I have had no problems with basic Gmail services. The internet restrictions though in China are notorious for being locally implemented - so what works (or doesn't) on one ISP, may not (or may) on another.

Moondog: Just a thought. Are you using a Open DNS address for the name server? Sometimes just doing this can open up the e-highway (not all the blocking they use here is so advanced - though some clearly is ....). If not I recommend "DNSjumper" - very easy to use. I normally select one of the openDNS addresses, but the Google ones also work.