Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Great Firewall of China
Internet access has been a lot more problematic this trip to China. Hotmail has been unavailable the entire trip, and Blogger unavailable most of the trip. I only have three days left here, so it is almost silly to do an update now (I use Blogger.com to post my blog entries). Nian is a little upset about not being able to get to hotmail, especially since we are awaiting word on some job applications I put in for overseas positions so we can be together permanently sooner. The Hotmail censorship seems to be quite recent and her local ISP assures her it will be lifted soon. I had mentioned China's penchant for filtering web access and censoring many websites the last time I was in China, but she seemed skeptical. China is even blocking BBC news that relates to its internet policies (I was really surprised they would censor the BBC) along with dozens of other news related items.
When using Google.com you can't retrieve "cached" items, probably because there is no way for the Chinese government to know whether the "cached" items come from a blocked website. Nian finally got motivated enough to search some Chinese forums about hotmail and lack of access and seemed shocked to confirm what I said was true. Until then she had assumed it was some technical problem or some configuration change I had made to her browser. Maybe it was my fresh install of an English version of Firefox and still unable to get to Hotmail and other websites that convinced her to investigate for herself.
There is a lot to say about our trip to visit Nian's Grandmother and after that a long stay in her hometown Wuhan with her father, but I will post this now while the posting is good. China's restrictive policies with regard to some freedoms of speech aren't apparent on the street or the bustling business centers, but it is there apparently seething and just below the surface. It isn't an Orwellian type of Big Brother ship, but an inconsistent type that concerns itself mostly with possible political criticism. There is much less day to day regulation in the daily lives of the Chinese, and a libertarian free market is everywhere and would lull you into thinking China is freer than even America, perhaps in many ways it is. I think the internet is a confusing beast to the Chinese government, one it knows it must live with to do business with the rest of the world, but would slay if it had the option. Hotmail will probably be online again in a week or so, in this case perhaps censorship is more a matter of harassment and business advantage for the Chinese Government, given their business dealings with Google (Gmail seems to work just fine), thus maybe they have motivation to harass Microsoft from time to time. It is hard to say. Still it is hard to believe that International business persons will tolerate lack of access to Hotmail for long.
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1 Comments:
Check out www.proxydom.com to access blocked sites.
By Anonymous, at June 27, 2006
