Not travel-related per se, but visitors to China who want to keep in touch with people and news back home may run into China’s Internet censors, nicknamed the Net Nanny or the Great Firewall.
With the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre/protests/uprising/incident coming up on Thursday, the reins of censorship have been drawn tighter. YouTube and Blogspot, which are only intermittently available anyway, went definitively “missing” a few weeks ago. Today, Twitter and Hotmail also disappeared. I’m hoping Gmail isn’t next.
James Fallows outlined the rationale and mechanism behind the Great Firewall in an article for the Atlantic last year. As he pointed out, it’s often remarkably easy to get around the Firewall. Google Reader users can still access Blogspot posts, for instance, as long as they put the RSS feed into a category. This takes “blogspot” out of the URL, so it does not get caught by China’s filters. Anyone using a VPN (or a free proxy server like Anonymizer) can surf the Internet as if they were in the States. But the activation energy required to get over the firewall deters most people within China from accessing sensitive political topics.
I was discussing the firewall with some students last week (without relation to Tiananmen Square), and most of them said they had never really noticed it. To paraphrase one student, if they can’t access it, they don’t know that it’s there. But one student, who is the “political one” in the class, said she once had a message board post rejected because of its political content. What is a hassle to foreign visitors has more than a chilling effect on Chinese netizens. And, based on the majority of my students’ nonchalance, the censorship is not upsetting the majority of Chinese citizens in the slightest — and is unlikely to change anytime soon.
In the meantime, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society recently set up a useful web site, Herdict.org, to collect reports about blocked sites all over the world. Report a blocked site, and Herdict will prompt other users in China and around the world to check the site’s accessibility.
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You have a good blog here full of tasty tid bits. I’m about to write a post on train travel in China and I will link your site into mine since you have made some wonderful images. I visited Beijing recently and experienced the “Net Nanny”–no access to wordpress. A little annoying but I knew I was leaving China. Must be hard if you are living there.