The Great Firewall of China

Greetings from Beijing.

I'd hoped to be an avid blogger here in China once I got settled, but alas it hasn't panned out that way. My main excuse, apart from being distracted by all the weird and wonderful things Beijing has to offer, is censorship.

Seasoned Sinophiles will already be familiar with the Great Firewall of China, but for the uninitiated (which included me until a couple of months ago), the internet is heavily monitored by the authorities here.

The Great Firewall prevents bloggers from posting freely and also limits what can be downloaded from the net. Wikipedia is completely blocked where I am, although I believe you can get limited access depending on your service provider. Don't attempt to visit the pages on Tibet though. BBC News, the home of biased and reckless western propaganda, is completely out. And just about all blogs are inaccessible. Even certain YouTube videos - on Tiananmen Square for example - 'cannot be found' if you click on them from China.

In ex-pat bars everybody is talking about proxy servers and other ways of getting around online censorship. You can try to find a proxy site online which would trick the government into thinking that you're accessing the web from Japan or the US, but it's not always that easy to do an internet search for that kind of thing.

Google did a deal with the authorities here which means they tailor search results and play ball with the censors, in return for access to China's swelling ranks of internet junkies.
Just for the laugh, I've Googled 'Great Firewall of China' and each of the first 10 results were blocked!

So, I can't read my own blog from here and an American colleague who managed to get some of her stuff online says it's not uncommon for posts to go live only to disappear later. I've also read of blogs going down for a few days and returning minus one or two 'offensive' articles. Obviously the definition of what is unacceptable varies wildly.

I'm attempting to post this as an experiment. The irony of having a piece on web censorship blocked or taken down will be lost on the army of censors diligently searching for keywords in a government department somewhere in Beijing. Just for them, I'd like to bring up the following: Mao, Bush, One-Child policy, Olympics, human rights, Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong and, er, the death of communism.

If anybody (other than the censors) actually read this, please let me know. I have no way of checking.

By for now,

Gary
ps I didn't coin the term 'Great Firewall of China' - I just wish I did