I received the following e-mail from fellow blogger Namit Arora who is traveling to China later this month and has just discovered that his blog (where I am a co-author) is not accessible from China. He checked and found that Accidental Blogger too is blocked. Namit wrote:
I found out that my website and SN (Shunya’s Notes) are not accessible from China. The Great Firewall (as it is called) blocks it. Perhaps because I have material on Tibetans which may be seen as sympathetic to their cause. China censors a large number of sites. Searches in china for Falun gong and Tiananmen square democracy uprising produce very different results.
http://blogoscoped.com/censored/
AB (Accidental Blogger) is also blocked in China (except from Hong Kong; test for yourself). Congratulations on being a thorn to the Chinese commies!
http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html
I checked for Beijing and Shanghai and indeed we are blocked. Now, that is funny. I know that we used to get a noticeable amount of traffic from China (from both Beijing and Shanghai among others) earlier and still do from Hong Kong where access is available. The Globe Tracker widget on the sidebar shows me that even now China ranks as 30th among all the countries whose incoming traffic to A.B. has been tracked since I installed the tracker. That means access has been curtailed quite recently.
We don’t write much on Chinese affairs here. Why would a small and inconsequential blog like ours raise a red flag in China? Could it be because of this and this? Most likely. And we haven’t even written about this!
Accidental Blogger 
14 responses to “The Great Firewall of China”
A colleague of mine who was in China recently told me that all ‘blogspot’ blogs are blocked there. So are the blogs on the typepad domain. It’s not clear why, but blogs on WordPress.com domain are okay with the Chinese.
It seems to me that the Great FireWall of China has nothing to do with the actual content of the blogs on these domains. In other words, it’s nothing personal!
Take a look at this post by a physicist who just returned from China:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/08/09/china-is-scared-of-blogs/
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That’s what I would have thought – that it is a blanket ban and China is not targeting individual blogs for content. I was aware of a ban quite some time ago, as far back as in December of 2005.
The funny thing is that A.B. which is a Typepad blog, kept getting traffic from China long after that. I still don’t think that it is anything personal. But why were we not caught in the first wave of Typepad ban?
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Abi, my investigation tells me that the blocking is sometimes wholesale (all blogs on a service, say), but for websites, blocking is usually targeted. Specific keyword searches are used to find and block websites, based on content. The effort is not comprehensive though — some “objectionable” sites make it past the great firewall (this is a commie bureaucracy after all — they should outsource the job to India! :-).
Wikipedia has a page on <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China>Internet censorship in China. Here are some more pages: flickr, bbc, golden shield project.
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And Namit, stay away from pork when you are in China.
I wonder what all this portends for the 2008 Olympics. May be the participating teams should bring their own food and water. It is not so much that diseases like SARS, the bird flu and now the pig virus, break out from time to time in China – it can happen anywhere. What bothers me is that when they do, the Chinese authorities’ immediate knee jerk reaction to deny and hide the facts. China is also the biggest consumer of animal parts from protected species like tigers, rhinoceres, exotic monkeys etc. for their so called beneficial medicinal powers. One such benefit includes male virility. (How much more callous and cruel can one be?) China therefore keeps alive the criminal poaching industry which is decimating the population and accelerating the possible extinction of beautiful animals like the Royal Bengal and other south Asian tigers. And we are reluctant to ban trade with this country just so that our prices stay low. What a shame!
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My experience has been that only Times & Seasons is available behind The Great Firewall of China … the rest of the bloggernacle appears to be mostly blocked based on casual/random attempts at accessing it from Shanghai and Beijing.
Now I came across this comment at Times & Seasons today, and apparently it is exactly the same situation in Saudi Arabia as well:
http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4027#comment-231983
What’s up with that?
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So, I go to LDS.org and I click on FamilySearch.org and proceed to Register and as I’m filling in the required fields, I notice that “Taiwan” is listed as a “Province of China” in the drop down Country menu.
I’m assuming it’s just the wishful thinking of some zealous mainlander who happened to get hired to do the site programming. That must be it. Even so, still bugs me to see it.
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Chino B,
So, what is your point? That the LDS church is alone in calling Taiwan a Province of China? So that they can wheedle their way into mainland China for missionary work? But that’s not the truth, is it? Whatever the motivation of the LDS, they are with the rest of the world on this one. The vast majority of countries (including the US) do not officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation and in effect tacitly agree with the claim that it is indeed a “break away province” of China. I feel bad for Taiwan which for all practical purposes is an independent nation but cannot get the recognition it deserves. But when one lives next to a bully, the bully gets to call the shots in the neighborhood.
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http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051011-142029
October 11, 2005
Google Says Taiwan is Now Taiwan … Not Taiwan, Province of China
Via Inside Google word in a San Jose Mercury Story that Google is labelling Taiwan as Taiwan on Google Maps and no longer: Taiwan, Province of China. This story arose a few days ago when Google said calling Taiwan, Province of China is consistent with international naming conventions. Well, that less than a week ago and now Google spokesperson, Debbie Frost, says, “The recent Google change is broader than just a fix on the Taiwan map. It’s an overall update of the service’s “user interface,” or what Web users see on-screen when they view any part of Google Maps.” Now that’s good timing.
Posted by Gary Price at October 11, 2005 2:20 PM
Apparently, not everyone in the rest of the world agrees with you that “might makes right”. The point here is quite simple: calling Taiwan a province of China, at least as of now, is just plain factually wrong.
On the off-chance anyone cares to understand how folks in Taiwan feel about the matter, this article (that came out a few days before Google’s decision to get it right) is a good summary:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/10/04/2003274363
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By the way, I know I sound strident and shrill (which I am on this issue), but I do appreciate the opportunity to vent here on this blog. You could have just as easily deleted or blocked my comments, and you didn’t, so three cheers for that (two for you and one big cheer for the freedom to be a crank without having to worry about somebody knocking on my door and hauling me off for a little ‘re-education’).
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And one last thing … I lived in China for 3 years, lived in Singapore for 2 years, and am going on 7 years living in Taiwan. Try voting when the guy next door has 600 missiles pointed your way … the Taiwanese are a brave bunch, my family is in the crosshairs, and it’s not like I’m just spouting off here, it’s personal. If you’re aware that for all practical purposes, Taiwan is an independent nation, I trust you can understand how the 21 million people on the island might feel when they see international organizations parroting the “province of China” line … a line that’s being propagated very aggressively by the bully next door.
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Chino:
You are welcome to vent as long as you are on topic and civil of tongue, which you have been so far.
I understand your frustration very well especially since you say your family is in the “cross hairs.” I have several Taiwanese friends and I know exactly where things stand. My comment was not meant to endorse the cowardly stance the world (the US and Google included) has taken in this regard. Taiwan has to pay other countries to get recognition for its sovereignty and even then some have decided to call it quits and side with China.
What I was pointing out is that the LDS church is hardly alone in using the politically charged misnomer – much bigger fries are going along with it. You read my comment totally wrong. I wasn’t saying that “might makes right.” I was actually lamenting the fact that the whole world is willing to offer Taiwan as a sacrificial lamb to Chinese military power and cheap labor.
I was born in India. I am very well aware of China’s tendency to play fast and loose with other nations’ territories. See what it has recently claimed about one of India’s north eastern states. Given the rest of the world’s indifference, I was just stating the obvious. That Taiwan is probably going to go the way of Tibet without the world raising a finger. On the other hand, knowing on which side its bread is buttered, China might treat Taiwan like Hong Kong. Either way, it is determined to make sure that Taiwan will one day be “a province of China.”
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Wow, thanks for the measured reply. I’m calm now. Sorry about that friendly fire.
Thanks also for the link. Nice how that Chinese Ambassador to India stated China’s position on Arunachal Pradesh so, uh, “diplomatically”, isn’t it? Sheesh, why doesn’t he just come out and say what he really thinks? ;-)
Anyway, I stumbled upon this thread through a Google search and I appreciate your handling my out-of-the-blue belligerence so gracefully. I’m in the middle of fighting a very narrow (possibly quite silly) campaign to encourage FamilySearch.org to change how they list Taiwan. Admittedly, I’m frying very small fish here. It’s almost as embarassing as the “dollar diplomacy” that Taiwan feels it needs to resort to in this situation (which I think is money that could probably be spent more effectively elsewhere, but that’s another story).
The good news is that Google Maps actually dropped the whole “Province of China” qualifier after a bit of complaining from our side, and now references Taiwan as simply “Taiwan” on their maps. In the bigger scheme of things, whether or not FamilySearch.org is willing to make a similar correction, probably isn’t going to change much, but at least I will have played my miniscule role as a Keyboard Kommando in the struggle.
Re your blog here … Maybe if you run a complete series on how China has now definitely, absolutely, beyond all doubt, fixed all problems and made their toy industry 100% safe, you’ll get back in their good graces. I’m guessing that linking to stories about Poison-Me-Elmo dolls is not helping your case :-)
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The US consumer is well aware of the problems with China. It’s our elected officials, retailers like Walmart and manufactures who have their eyes on the most profitable bottom line and look the other way, who are responsible for the sorry state of affairs regarding imports from China.
Here are a couple of letters regarding China’s shoddy manufacturing practices in today’s Houston Chronicle. I am copying the one from an official of the Taiwanese Consulate in Houston ( Chronicle links disappear after a few days). The appeal is quite funny and rather pathetic actually. Taiwan is offering to help China with its quality control woes in return for an end to China’s bullying!
Taiwan could share
I read the Chronicle’s Aug. 17 editorial “China syndrome,” about the latest development in China’s food and consumer products safety crisis, and I have to say that China would do well to look to Taiwan’s example regarding quality control on exported products. In the 1970s, Taiwan experienced a burst of economic growth that was fueled by exports; and, for a time, Taiwan, too, was plagued with quality-control issues.
The turning point came when consumer awareness, market-based experience and a transparent and democratic regime of product regulation converged. Indeed, the solutions that have made Taiwan a producer of high-quality goods were not found by jawboning or authoritative or extreme measures (such as executions or suicides) but in democratic regulatory structures, the rule of law, sensitivity to consumers and compliance with international standards.
Taiwanese businesses invest tens of millions of dollars on China’s mainland every year. With their expertise and a shared language and cultural background, the mainland government and China’s business community could tap into this Taiwanese experience and knowledge. Of course, those in Taiwan would be more inclined to help their cousins on the mainland if China were to demonstrate a more friendly, reasonable and peaceful approach to Taiwan — particularly in matters of Taiwan’s international space.
T.K. LEE
director, press division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Houston
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Thanks for posting this, T.K. Lee’s letter was a fun read. It’s nice to see someone like T.K. who works for his govt salary, impressive.
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