If you’d like to find out what it’s like to live behind a paranoid regime’s wall of silence download the China Channel plug-in for Firefox. This delightful product recreates the surfing experience of someone at a standard Internet-connected computer in China where searching for “Free Tibet” and “Tiananmen Square” brings you 10 minutes of dead air.
The program routes your traffic through a Chinese IP address and gives you a taste of the Great Firewall in action. Thankfully, most of these censorship systems are trivial to beat but this still leaves a certain subset of the population unable to search comfortably and safely in cyber cafes and other public access points.
Incidentally, I wonder what the Internet looks like in North Korea… oh, wait.
That’s weird I can’t read this post.
Interesting:)
I wonder whether you would be tracked by the Chinese government if you are using this service.
Well, well, well
I live in Shanghai and I would have to say the biggest issue I have with the internet is that the firewall makes any web site that is not hosted in China incredibly slow. Then, if I proxy my connection through my own server, the transfer speeds go back up to normal. The ‘blocked sites’ issue is fundamentally wrong, but practically, I run into a slowness issue more often.
From another post: This is another comment from the BBC: President Obama will ask Congress to change immigration laws in order to allow thousands of HIV-infected Africans to move to the US with government financial help.
This “humanitarian exodus” will start with citizens of Kenya…
The concept behind this action is to share the high quality of health care in the US with foreign countries in need.
Cool. It appears McCain’s financial backers are using a blog fake comment marketing service similar to the one the Chinese government employs when it is criticized, though they at least stay on topic and try not spam.
Ohh no!! That must be a really scary experience to surf for anything on the web if I live in that country. Maybe I don’t surf at all for fear being executed.
Cheap shot to associate firefox with communism.
It hasn’t worked for M$ to call linux a communist plague.
It won’t work for you.
Lame journalism.
wha?
how does this associate firefox with communism?
Common, I am typing in China, and I have no problem at all searching “free tibet” or whatever, and get no “dead air” at all…why you guys are so facinated about creating such a illusion of communist China? Tell you, it’s not like that.
For some reason, when I was watching that video I could not help to think that this video really inaccurately portrayed what it is actually like surfing the web in China. I guess you really busted that claim up, ha.
Only because you’re googling in English.
The Chinese govt don’t give a damn if you’re a foreigner.
What an absolute waste of time!
This is chinese democracy.
This concept is hilarious. haha.
This is total bullshit. I’ve used the internet from China countless times and while in a few places there was obvious filtering (the most filtered was in Shanghai), many locations had none at all.
Enough with the anti-China propaganda
I know, it is kind of sickening. We love to point out the flaws in other countries don’t we, yet in NA our gov’ts spy on us. The Dixie Chicks stopped getting played on radio stations because they were anti-war which is censorship on a more subtle level.
It is easy to point out the flaws in other cultures and countries but real journalism is understanding why these flaws exist.
Have you been to China Jason? Do you know why they have censorship or other forms of control? Do you know why all countries do this in more subtle ways? Have you seen the enormous strain 1.5 billion people can have on a country? Have you considered for a moment what would happen to the world’s economy if China suddenly did what Russia did and turned to democracy?
When you are dealing with that many people change takes time. China is heading in the right direction.
This is total bullshit. I have had several personal experiences in China where I did not have any filtered Internet connection, therefore I conclude: nothing to see here, move along, stop with the anti-China propaganda. Q.E.D.
Of course it is worst in Tibet. But who cares for us since you eat and buy cheap items that your greed make you buy from China. Even India who only humanitarian nation is now in fear. So think, only internet freedom does not make you free, but freedom from greed and supporting evil people.
Good resources to help fight censorship in China and abroad (from the bottom of http://chinachannel.hk)
http://chinesewall.ccc.de/index-en.html
http://www.picidae.org/
http://internetfreebeijing.com/
Who’re we to judge what’s going on in other country, yet along to fight against it? It like before we know the earth is round, people used to think the earth is square shaped, because we were told so. Propaganda telling you China is evil and you just buy it. This is childish!
It’s really sickening to see so many westerners think and act as if there were saviours to this world and they can just solve any problems. Look what they done to Iraq! They got rid of Saddam, and things got any better over there? Get one thing straight, I’m Chinese, I don’t like a lot of thing the Chinese government have done, but you have to set rules and boundaries when you have billions ppl in your country. With out boundaries, the country will going to chaos. Unless this is really what you want to see!
The other time I stayed in Beijing I had difficulty surfing to some of the respected US sites
what are respected US sites? cnn.com? fox.com?
they are so biased.
Wonder when this big country is going to embrace “internet rights”.
Jason Briggs have you been to China?
who is jason briggs?
lol sorry, reading TC and commenting is always fun while at work. You have to listen for cracking knees which means the boss is coming around.
I think when Obama is elected America will once again respect “internet and privacy rights.” Hopefully…
Please don’t criticize China when you’re own government has been, is and will be responsible for so many WARS throughout the world.
That’s kind of a non-sequitur.
I wonder if it matters if you search in English or in Chinese?
If you’re insinuating I have my opinion because I’m Chinese you’re wrong and you’re being a total moron. I just don’t trade humanism for patriotism.
It can matter, depending on the topic. You can, for example, pull up English versions of really controversial sites from Taiwan - but not the Chinese versions. And as others have noted, what is blocked changes - for all of September YouTube was unblocked; now it’s blocked again. Wikipedia is unblocked as is Blogspot, but Wordpress is blocked. Who knows what November will bring.
Anyone who wants to see blocked sites knows how to use very simple tools to get around the blocks, but if you just go online open up your browser and try to look for things, it can get very frustrating. But I agree with the others who say the quality of the connection is actually often more annoying than the firewall.
(And yes, I live in China, am typing from China, and read/write Chinese)
You got us there, AK
I’d also like to remark that red herrings are the China apologist’s best friend. It’s impossible for them to come up with rational explanations to account for China’s behavior. Hence, they almost always tend to resort to a few catch phrases:
1. “Have you been to China?” and of course, if that fails, then “Can you speak fluent Mandarin?”
2. “Bad things happen in the West, too!”
3. “Things are getting better!”
Lame. For some reason people who usually are capable of using deduction and logic to make a point seem to jettison all of those abilities when China comes into the picture.
To the apologists: when discussing China, PLEASE try to discuss BOTH China AND the issue at hand.
I live in China. Have lived here for 5 years.
Surfing the net is a true pain in the ass. Sure, this article hypes it up a bit, but it’s not a bunch of bullshit or propaganda. There are countless filters and if you get caught by one of them your internet will stop working for 10 minutes or so.
There’s also a lot of intermittent disappearances of websites - particularly wikipedia, facebook, and youtube. Blog sites run from outside of China are also sketchy.
I also work closely with search engine companies here, so I know more than the average person how extensive the filtering and supression is.
A lot of the apologists who have never been to China or only come for a day or two here and there are without a clue when it comes to the reality of the ground here. PLEASE STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT’S BEHAVIOR!
Honestly, though, I can live without internet porn or searches for falun gong or tiananmen square. What really sucks is that the internet runs at about 1/25th the speed of the internet in the rest of the world. That blows.
Rob what did you think of the massage houses. The ones where they take your clothes and make you bath naked next to 40 other guys. The second floor is sweet with the hot girls giving you a massage. 3rd floor is sketchy….
It will be censorius Australia soon …
http://www.efa.org.au/2008/10/25/the-mark-newton-letter/
I am a chinese.There are actualy many sites be blocked.But I do not think I have no that “freedom” things,I just do not like these sites too.
Is this really about caring for Chinese citizens or mocking the Chinese and the system within China? I think the later. To be sure, there is web censorship in China, but if you talk to the average Chinese bloke, he doesn’t give a damn about the government censoring “Free Tibet” searches because more likely than not, he supports the government in keeping Tibet part of Chinese territory. Recent Pew Research polling says 80% of Chinese citizens likes the way CCP is handling things (highest approval rate for any government), this despite all the censorship…
The truth is that most Chinese people do not deal very well with individual choice anyway. Political issues and legislated morality are things they usually see as making their lives more simple and easy.
More and more, though, as younger kids grow up - many people are wanting to at least make the choice for themselves rather than have the parental figure government dictate it to them. Many things would stay the same way if people had their choices, but at least they would get to decide for themselves. That would at least nurture the critical thinking instinct in China - which is SEVERELY LACKING and leads to things like copyright piracy and melanine being added to milk (et al).
@bob - mocking oppressive systems, having a laugh at ridiculous policies, and giving a crap about people in other countries are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The heavy-handed control of the internet in China is absurd as well as expenive. Trust me - the billions they spend on that would be much better spent fighting police corruption and rampant prostitution. These things are pervasive in the society and yet due to the nature of the system nothing is done about them. Instead, the gov would like to make sure that people don’t have unfettered access to information.
People have the right to decide what they want to study and what they want to believe. Anywhere. There’s not a single good argument for denying people this right.
Truth is that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Chinese people have absolutely no idea the extent of censorship here. It’s a testiment to how well the government has controlled the flow of information over the years.
Yes - things actually are getting better (slowly), but in terms of twisting/filtering information they are actually getting worse.
I lived in China from 2002 to 2007, mostly in Shanghai. The comments saying that the blocking is not real are either lying or don’t know what they’re talking about. The amount of blocking would vary over time — for example, just before the handover of power to Hu Jintao nearly all Western sites were blocked — but Wikipedia; the BBC; all blogs hosted on services with ‘blog’ in the name, like blogspot; and all newspapers from Taiwan were blocked. And that was the English versions of them. In addition, the Internet speed is super slow.
I live in China I do not see this issue at all. No problems searching most items, i guess this application would be more suited to Bhurma or perhaps North Korea.
You can’t even click thru this link in China:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/LrPNGNSRK90/
Just because FeedBurner is blocked in China…
P.S.Check out Windows Live Space Simplified Chinese version if you love this experience. You can’t even submit article with Chinese phrase like freedom, but free*dom is acceptable.
I am from Pakistan and love the people of China becasue they are very quite. if any chanies girls read my this sms then he contact me on my email address or my cell.
tasawar005@hotmail.com
00920333-7638116
Tell me about it. Luckily for me, I have an office with the computer facing away from the door. I could stop doing work for several weeks before anyone noticed… =)
I still think MSN or Facebook or TC would be smart to have an oh shit my boss is coming button where you hit control something and your work stuff appears over your not work stuff and the tabs hide.
But then again I am still waiting for the I got to shit button which automatically prints off 10 stories from random blogs in genres you like that you haven’t read.