10/24/2005 05:45:00 PM|||The Zen Master|||I was suitably upset when I tried to look something up on Wikipedia earlier and encountered the "site not found" message that here in China signifies not an error in the internet but rather the mark of the government's web censors, laying the stones of what has been cutely (if not unexpectedly) termed "The Great Firewall of China." Apparently, according to this post on ArsTechnica the Chinese-language version of the site has been blocked since June 14, 2004, a day before the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests (and ensuing massacre). Still, until a couple of days ago, the English edition of one of the internet's most useful sources of unfiltered information was 100% accessible from here in Beijing and throughout China.
One theory, posted on Fons Tuinstra's blog, China Herald, suggests that the ban might be temporary (pray with me here!), related to a desire to limit access to information about assisted suicide in the wake of the death at age 101 of famed author Ba Jin, who spoke of his desire to die with dignity shortly before he passed away on October 17th.
Let's hope that theory has more weight than I think it does. I need my Wikipedia!
An even more recent post on the China Herald page reminds me of something more immediately relevant to this blog: for some reason, since I've been here, blogspot sites have been given free access through the checkpoints of the Great Firewall. I didn't take the time to theorize, instead preferring just to count myself lucky that I no longer had to access my own blog through a proxy server and happy in the knowledge that others readers in China could now find it more easily. The post in question, however, points to this blog, which suggests that Google might have conducted some under-the-table transaction with the Chinese goverment in order to enact this change, since Microsoft's bloghosting site was not restricted here, and Google owns the Blogger service. The great site Danwei has this to say.|||113014713136629789|||Wikipedia falls victim to the Great Firewall