Several news come to my attention from my reading this morning – there are some serious actions on China’s Internet. I read some posts in V2EX about an announcement on shutting down online BBS and blogger sites before the big meeting is about to start in China. At first I thought it was just some ‘normal’ regulations that required to issue in a certain period but few are actually implemented. But this one is not. If you read a report from cwrblog and a post in Wangjianshuo’s blog, then you can sense that this time there are some real actions.
I can’t feel how serious it’s because I’m currently not in China. But for the last few days several friends asked me through IM to see if I can access to some certain websites, because they couldn’t.
Maybe I have been out from China for too long, such an action starts to make me think ‘This is Crazy!’. Shutting down Data Centre and unplugging servers in a scale of tens of thousands, it’s unthinkable.
Yesterday, in an email with a teacher who is going to join MyShantou.net, we were discussing to write news about Shantou in a more objective and critical view. I said that it’s only safe to do so when our domain and hosting is aboard and not in China, because we just never know when the content will become ‘sensitive’ , or when our blog will be shut down over night for the reason that ‘you are not allow to write blogs in China’. Now the timing cannot be righter to prove my point.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Yeah, well they’re always blocking foreign sites. Can’t get on flipping Flickr since the Xiamen protests thanks to some idiot who put photos on. They could have had a thought for the rest of us and put them on a private blog, no??!! Blogspot is back offline too these days. And did you know, a lot of Chinese internet users know this, but most don’t know they’re censored. Some of my friends don’t even believe me when I tell them, or think the websites concerned must really be unsavoury.
About the blocking of Flickr, I think the problem is not from the uploader. If s/he is a user then s/he should be able to upload photos as s/he wishes, unless it’s inappropriate or vitiating Flickr’s policy, which I don’t think uploading photos of demonstration is forbidden.
But on the other hand you’ve got a point. I remember a while ago there was a Chinese blogger ‘Anti’ who was criticised to be a ‘trouble maker’ to most BSP because his post contains sensitive political topics and cause the BSP to be shut down. His entire blog was deleted by MSN space when he wrote sensitive articles. It was a big controversy at the time about MSN space deleted his blog in order to survive in China. Yet most of them were against MSN space.
The majority of Chinese netizens still don’t know about the censorship. I’m not surprised. Because it’s censorship only effect those who want to know more than they are allowed to know, and that is still a minority.
? Yes but uploading photos of demonstrations in China is forbidden in China. So flickr shut down right after those Xiamen demonstrations. We can still upload photos and access the site, but it’s impossible to view any images. Highly irritating.
Hehe, if you are using Firefox, try this one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4286