It's for business of course, mainly international companies I guess. Local companies don't need to cross the firewall. Employees can only use these lines in the office. Actually most Chinese are not aware of the existence of the Great Firewall (GFW), really bad.
In the tech field, everyone is very very aware. I can't speak about other fields though. In my experience, pretty much anyone who is middle class or above knows about it. Granted middle class and above is only about 300 million of the almost 1.4 billion people -- so very much a minority. Granted China is huge and I mainly move in tech circles so YMMV.
It's not just international companies. Chinese companies are all about going overseas now. China is now a next exporter of investment. Plus it seems every company with an app that has a moderate amount of success wants to reach Chinese outside of the China -- they have more money -- and so need to integrate with blocked services like FB. And exporting Chinese online games to other developing nations is really taking off.
Thanks for your info. As a graduate student major in civil engineering in China, people around me come across the firewall when they need Google Scholar, which is rare also. Sometimes they come to me for help to get access to sites like Google Scholar. But, believe me, they don't care about what is GFW or anything about the censorship. yes, the big brother is watching and they want to be good netizens. Traditional industries like CE don't depend on internet much, so GFW does not have much influences on them. Even to programmers in internet companies, I doubt the proportion of people accessible to the free internet.
Above is based on personal experiences and may not be that precise. Things are complicated in China anyway.
As an undergraduate student majoring in software engineering in China, I'm interning for a foreign company and we have access to free internet through proxies. And in my experience, most programmers regard free network as a necessity. And for people in large cities, it is true that they don't actually care about GFW, but I think many of them are at least aware of the existence of it, and sometimes break through it out of curiosity.
