Having brought with me overseas my old Acer Aspire 5500Z, I now had the opportunity to install a fresh copy of Archlinux on one of my other production laptops. My mistake was not going through the admittedly lengthy procedure while outside Shanghai - even with the mirrorlist set up properly I had no luck installing the base packages through the pacstrap script.
I tried selecting several relatively close mirrors in Singapore, Hong Kong, as well as the default (and fast) servers in the U.S. but a stable connection could not be made. Although I had a wired connection and could browse the Internet (and run other Linux systems), I couldn't undergo the complete Archlinux installation. I realized that Archlinux's strength can be its weakness when placed in a location where Internet access is restricted or unreliable. All mainstream distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mageia are reliant on the Internet for packages and updates but their ISOs come with working applications even without Internet access. Archlinux, unfortunately, makes Internet access mandatory during installation. An Arch-based distribution such as Cinnarch, which includes a Cinnamon desktop environment and preinstalled software, is an option but you lose whatever advantages an Archlinux-based distribution has without access to Arch's international mirrors.
I encountered a similar issue with openSUSE 12.1 a year ago, which also involved the inability to access the main openSUSE repositories. The issue resolved itself almost half a year later though accessibility is still a struggle in Shanghai. Hopefully, the same resolution will occur with Arch. In the meantime, I have to revert to the recent release of Lubuntu or install FreeBSD.
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