I started playing in 3.0, so I'm probably not the best source of information, but here's what I know. Gaara has two forms in the game currently: Kazekage Gaara and normal Gaara. Kazekage is in the Kage treasure and has an auto barrier, while normal has a manual barrier and can be skill broken. Normal only shields at the beginning of the battle. Kazekage shields before his first action and not at the beginning of battle (his skill description is off). Kazekage also gets skillbreaks in the Chinese version. Since both are used pretty often in ninja exams, you might have gotten confused :P. Of course, they might have changed it from 1.0, as they did nerf a couple of characters from what I've heard.

In CN, Gaara gets a Y standard attack that shields 2 units. You can check with this: https://docs.google.com/do*ent/d/1NugtF12K5S1lPNH1vkE2cp5mjV9kEvJDLdaWFY_V610/edit# (ctrl f to search)

Replace the censoring in the link with c then u then m.