While I was aware that China blocks access to Internet sites its Communist Party rulers deem “inappropriate,” I had not realised the full extent of Big Brother’s censorship till I came across the bezdomny ex patria blog by a Beijing based New Zealander, Chris Waugh (Wangbo), who is teaching English there.
Former Wellingtonian Chris asks, in an article on his blog, why so many Kiwi boggers use Blogspot.
“Alright,” Chris blogs, “I know, it’s free, and we’re a nation of cheap bastards (my Scottish heritage is my excuse, what’s yours?), but Blogtown is also free and 100 per cent pure New Zealand and infinitely better (being based on WordPress ’n all)…. So come on people, what’s with the Blogspot obssession?”
It turns out that one of Chris’s gripes with Blogspot is it is automatically blocked by the Chinese censors, through their Golden Shield Project, otherwise known as the Great Firewall of China.
Golden Shield, started in 1998, consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways of China’s Internet service providers. The banning of websites is mostly unco-ordinated and ad-hoc, with some sites blocked and similar ones allowed, or a site blocked in one city but not in another.
The Great Firewall blocks, or attempts to block, such sites as Wikipedia, YouTube, dissident groups like Falun Gong and pro-democracy activists, news sources that cover issues such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Taiwanese government sites, anything the Chinese authorities regard as obscene or pornographic, sites associated with the Dalai Lama, and most blog sites.
As well as Golden Shield being ad-hoc, web surfers in China can work around it. As Chris says: “This does not stop me checking Kiwi blogs, although it does discourage me. I mean, having to use some kind of proxy or other work around is an extra layer of hassle.”
Ironically, though, Chris’s main gripe with New Zealand blogs is not Blogspot or the Great Firewall, but their almost complete lack of relevance to his life in Beijing.
“That feels like it should be a bizarre thing to say, but reading posts about grumpy Wellingtonian bus drivers is like, well, reading posts about grumpy Gaborone (what is the adjective?) bus drivers. And yet, Wellington is my hometown, and I know perfectly well every street and location referred to in that post.”
Ouch, the grumpy bus driver post he cites was one of mine.
“And, well, Kiwi politics? Yeah, that’s a bit more relevant, but so much of the discussion is so utterly pathetic. But still, I do like to keep up to date with goings on in Aotearoa, and blogs are one way of doing that – an increasingly important way, considering the rapid downhill slide of New Zealand’s mainstream media.”
Chris’s blog is mostly about his life in China. He says the Great Firewall is not targeted at someone like him: “I’m one of the least threatening people I know, and I don’t blog about the kind of stuff that would have people kicking my door in and dragging me off for re-education.”
It is shameful, however, in a rapidly modernising country like China, whose people enjoy massively greater economic and social freedoms than only 20 years ago and which now basically has a free-market economy, that censorship of free expression takes place on such a great scale. This is a country that is about to sign a historic free-trade agreement with New Zealand, so we have more than a passing interest in issues like this.
If China’s open economy is to last and truly thrive, the Great Firewall will need to go the way of Mao’s appalling Great Leap Forward, into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.
Update: As a result of the article above, The Hive say they fear for Blogtown (hoster of Chris’s blog) now its free access has been brought to the attention of the Chinese authorities. The Hive report complaining about being blocked in China, the result being “we miraculously started being read by a computer in Beijing. Indeed, every time we post on China, Taiwan, or the DPRK, we are within hours being read by that computer. We wonder who operates this computer?”
12 Comments
March 10, 2008 at 11:11 am
Hey thanks for that link to Wangbo Poneke, I think it will be interesting read.
Also webblocking is quite frequent in Asia. I couldn’t access in DPRK sites when I lived in the South (for obvious reasons) however the South’s government also blocked blogger and wordpress when there was information they didn’t want spread (like the decapitating of a Korean guy).
Which just goes to show that freedom of speech, even in the more ‘democratic’ countries, is certainly a difficult concept in Asia. Ohh I feel a post coming on.
March 10, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I blogged something about the Dalai Lama last year, and a couple of days later received an e-mail from a friend in Shanghai to say that she couldn’t read my weblog any more.
Ironically, I was taking the piss out of him. He was visiting Melbourne and the city was full of his strange groupies. I’d guess that the Chinese government would have agreed with me.
March 10, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Wow, I’m surprised my little rant inspired such a post.
Anyway, The Hive is perhaps worrying too much for blogtown. I know people who blog about far more sensitive stuff far more often from inside China and still haven’t been blocked- or worse. I think you lot on the other side of the Great Firewall seem to get the idea that censorship is far more pervasive than it really is. Blogs, for example: blogspot and everything hosted on wordpress.com (Poneke, for example, but wordpress-powered blogs on different domains, like blogtown, are open) are blocked, but most others are open.
Anyway, there are usually ways around all that.
Oh, and I didn’t mean anything critical when I mentioned that grumpy bus driver post, I only meant that, after eight years in China, it seems so distant from my life, even though you’re writing about my hometown and I recognise all the places. It’s an odd feeling.
Even so, lately I’ve been making an effort to see what is going on in the Kiwi blogosphere, and I’m quite impressed with most of what I’ve been finding- grumpy bus drivers included.
[Poneke says: Chris, be assured my tongue was firmly in my cheek with the grumpy bus driver reference. And great to have found your blog!]
March 10, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Your bus drivers are pussycats, check out this one: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10496945
And I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy was a bus driver too:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10497055&ref=rss
March 10, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Seriously, I think our bus drivers should be drug tested.
March 10, 2008 at 3:18 pm
davidp, don’t take it personally. You got caught up in the blogspot ban, that’s all.
March 10, 2008 at 9:45 pm
chriswaugh_bj:
I don’t know if I feel particularly comforted that state censorship of blogs in China is arbitrary and spotty. But what the hell, we get a FTA and all the Olympic spirit we can handle and who give tupenny toss about the rest of it?
At least you’re not in the same position as Tang Wei, who is persona non grata due to her performance in Lust, Caution (http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSN0935238620080309) — at least we should assume that’s the case because China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) apparently operates on the old Victorian principle of ‘never apologise, never explain’.
March 10, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Craig, fortunately I’m nowhere near as attractive (nor as female) as Tang Wei, and have no acting talent, so I’m safe from SARFT.
And you’re not supposed to be comforted by the arbitrary and spotty nature censorship and blocking I have to deal with here- the whole point is to remind us that there is a line we shouldn’t cross, but to keep that line blurry and vague so that we’ll self-censor. It’s not so much a Great Firewall as a Great Panopticon- it makes you behave because you know that there could be somebody watching, but you never know when they’re watching.
March 11, 2008 at 9:37 am
People always seem mildly surprised when a totalitarian government acts, well, totalitarian.
I’m still surprised though that the Chinese government gets rewarded with the Olympics.
March 11, 2008 at 9:48 am
In the scheme of totalitarian regimes, China has come a long way and is moving in the right direction, too.
Its people have vastly more freedoms than only a decade or two back, and the genie is really out of the bottle.
Its political leaders are even taking aboard a democratic politician’s nose for issues of public concern, for example, in the big snow of a few weeks back, senior figures were out there with the stranded people showing the government flag. A month or so back, I saw some senior figure saying the government would like to get rid of capital punishment, but the public still demanded it.
I’m certainly not rosy-glassesed over the regime there, but given where China has come from even in my short lifetime, I don’t see them as even close to the worst in the world for totalitarianism, and if they keep on in the present direction, I think they will become a democracy within the medium-term future.
And I adore their food.
March 11, 2008 at 1:57 pm
James Fallows in the Atlantic has a substantial article on the sophistication of the Firewall:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall
May 30, 2009 at 9:51 am
China firewall is lame – use Freedur.com to bypass it. You can bypass China Great Firewall and access youtube.com and all other sites which are blocked.