During my short visit
to China I was fortunate to have access to the Internet in my hotel
room. Despite knowing in advanced that many of the things I would
normall do on the Net were not accessible, I was still surprised
about what I could and could not access.
Gmail was not blocked,
however nearly all images that were in my emails were blocked. BBC
news was not blocked. I was told that the pages in Chinese were all
blocked. Wikipedia also not blocked. My Google Reader worked well
which allowed me to read the content of
As expected YouTube, Facebook,
Blogger, Google+, Twitter, Livemocha all blocked. My friend described
this as blocking “Things 老外lǎowài
Like”. While this trivialises censorship in China it is an accurate
and perceptive description of how inconvenient annoying the Great
Firewall was.
I did try and succeed
using a web proxy once. While it worked it was excessively slow (it
was as fast as dial-up Internet speeds) and did not work the next
day. I have heard that there are better solutions to accessing
content and I would definitely do this if I were spending a longer
time in China.
Below are some links to
articles and documentaries about China's Great Firewall.
The
Other Internet – Beyond China’s Great Firewall This is an
interesting podcast from the BBC.
lol
ReplyDelete