Despite all the talk, all the late night sweats in Beijing, and all the curses from VPN-lagging China-based twitterers; it turns out Twitter and the PRC see more eye-to-eye than either side would have you believe.
The following is a screen capture by Nick (@riceagain), a Kiwi splitting his time between Taiwan and the Mainland, who noticed a peculiar phrasing when attempting to set the Twitter tweet location to “Taiwan”:
As I write this, I am listening to Radio Free Asia, a podcast which I subscribed to on iTunes with no hassle. After I finish writing this, I plan, just for shits and grins, to run a Google search on Liu Xiaobo and proclaim my love for a free Tibet on Twitter. When I first [...]
According to a post on Global Voices, Sven Englund, a Swede studying in Shanghai’s Fudan University, has been interrogated and has had his passport confiscated by Shanghai police after writing a “letter” to the Chinese President Hu Jintao in his Chinese-language blog.
Not wishing to bring any undue wrath down on me or mine, I’ll not re-post Sven’s letter, which GV has translated. Essentially it asks China’s president to join him in a flash mob event in Shanghai (or the president’s city of choice) on July 1st promoting “freedom”.
According to his summoning notice, Sven is suspected of “being harmful to social management” and has violated article 55 of the “PRC social security management law”, which I’m guessing is the one about no protesting or organizing large gatherings without permission.
My gut reaction is: Sven, dude… what were you thinking?
This is clever.
So a few years ago Google enters China and is put under a global grilling lamp on whether or not it will adhere to local laws regarding censorship and its search results. Don’t Be Evil held for a little while, but 300+ million Chinese Internet users was bound to make anyone check their morals at the gate eventually. But then, after floundering around in the country for a few years, they largely said, “F this, we’re out!“.
So a few years ago Baidu enters the US market. That the search engine filters search results to suit Beijing goes relatively unnoticed, as does actual usage of the company for anything other than investment purposes. Routinely noise gets made about Baidu distributing copyrighted this and that, and Baidu just as routinely starts blocking access to those functions for visitors coming from outside of China. Happy medium.
Then today a couple folks in Flushing, NY, get a smart idea — if Google was forced to adhere to the laws of China while operating inside the country, shouldn’t Baidu have to adhere to the laws of the US while operating there?
Usually I love living in China, thirstily drinking the kool-aid that this place is changing for the better, improving a little bit every day. Sure it has its warts, but compared to 5 years ago, 15 years ago, 35 years ago… it’s definitely improving — right?
Then Youtube gets blocked, Facebook and Twitter follow, as do pretty much all major UGC/SMS sites. Ok, ok, it’s a complete pain in the ass, seems totally backwards and is making the country look more like its paranoid DPRK neighbours than a major player on the world stage. But maybe things were getting a little too out of hand with free speach 2.0, and the whole system needed to be throttled a bit to keep Zhongnanhai comfortable with modernization.
But this is just getting ridiculous:
Shanghai Daily: The Chinese regulator has declared Internet phone services other than those provided by China Telecom and China Unicom as illegal, which is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country.
Tom Lasseter, who in 2009 took over the Beijing bureau chief spot for McClatchy Newspapers from long-timer Tim Johnson, has a great post on his blog about the GFW.
Due to a computer glitch, Tom lost his VPN the other night and without it decided to traipse around the Internet as viewed from inside China (and with no tunnel out). Poking around here and there and brushing up against its fiery walls, he concludes that the various blocks in place aren’t just to outright deny access, but rather to make it more convenient to get information from a more controlled and State-friendly source.
Yesterday Elaine at the Shanghaiist reported a number of sites were miraculously unblocked — Vimeo, Hootsuite, VOA News. Checking now and it appears Hootsuite has re-fallen to the mighty River Crab, but Vimeo is still powering along … for now.
Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are all still unaccessible.
Welcome back one and all to the May edition of Fact or Fiction. Those of you who read either of the last three will know, every edition I will have a guest and we will discuss a few of the big issues in China of the day. Every answer will have a “Fact” or a “Fiction” and some justification to go along with it.
Today my guest is Josh Summers, a writer with a passion for the province of Xinjiang. He and his wife arrived in Xinjiang in August of 2006 and for reasons unknown to them stayed for almost four years. Their experiences in the province have been featured on sites such as the BBC, MSNBC and China Daily, but Josh takes most pride in the writings he publishes on his own site, Xinjiang: Far West China.
Although he moved back to Texas in March of 2010, he continues to focus on his adopted home back in China. In May he released a Turpan travel guide and is almost finished completing two more guides for Urumqi and Kashgar. The perks of life in America have already worn off after two months and he’s hoping to return again to Xinjiang in the future.
Today Josh and I are going to be discussing a variety of issues in the Westernmost region in the Middle Kingdom. So join us for Fact or Fiction 6: Xinjiang, the Final Frontier…
If you’ve somehow missed the news, Google.cn has officially exited China, sort of. Instead of pulling out of the country completely, they’ve moved the search division of their business to Hong Kong, which is free of the political censorship rules that the Mainland’s internet is subject to.
Now when visiting google.cn, visitors are automatically redirected to Google.com.hk, which now features Simplified Chinese options and search abilities (perhaps it always did?). And while search results are no longer self-censored by the search company, they are now subject to the daft diligence of the Great Firewall of China. Searching for terms deemed too sensitive for your own good will return the “connection has been reset” error that we’ve all come to love.
At this point, everyone knows about Google’s decision to channel Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” and more or less say “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” when it comes to complying with China’s internet censorship laws. In its January 12 blog post, Google stated that the company does in fact recognize [...]
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