Tate Modern has posted this message of support for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was detained on Sunday at Beijing Airport, on its façade. The British arts organisation is also encouraging people to sign this petition calling for the artist’s release [via CR] who is accused of “economic crimes”.
The “Great Firewall of China” (GFW), officially know as the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程), is the system which filters, blocks and censors the flow of information online within the People’s Republic of China as sanctioned by the government to “protect” its citizens from content it deems harmful to societal stability (or “harmony” as they call it here).
A friend of mine noticed something odd while visiting Hong Kong last weekend. Despite Hong Kong not being subject to the heavy internet blocks and censorship on the mainland he still couldn’t get Facebook or Twitter to work on his iPhone (which had international roaming turned on). Hong Kong residents using one of the local providers don’t face any such restrictions and after testing out a few different apps as well as making sure the sites worked fine on a normal laptop we began to become suspicious.
Google dropped a bomb on China and the world today when it revealed a string of sophisticated cyber attacks against its infrastructure targeted against human rights activists’ email accounts which had originated from China (similar to the GhostNet attack in 2009). In response Google has decided to cease censoring Google.cn search results (demanded by the government):
After the Beijing 2008 Olympics most people anticipated that internet censorship in China would ease but contrary to expectations the situation continues to get worse with more sites being blocked by the week (see whatblocked.com for the latest). Traditionally people bypassed the blocks using anonymous proxies and other free services but many of these have also been barred by the government and those which remain are usually so overwhelmed that service is patchy and slow at best. The best solution for foreigners in China and anyone wanting to access sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook these days is to get a personal VPN account using one of the commercial services available. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, basically allows you to create a secure tunnel through…
I recently compiled a list of popular English language sites which are currently blocked, or have been at some point in the past, in China (you can find the most current version on whatblocked.com): What struck me is how this has changed over the past few years; before mainstream news organisations (e.g. BBC) and various activist groups were the clear targets but today this has dramatically shifted towards social media (e.g. Twitter) and services which allow the free sharing of content outside China’s digital borders (e.g. YouTube). Within China clones of sites like Facebook (e.g. RenRen) have been allowed to flourish under the direct control of the government who are free to monitor and censor at will. After the 60th anniversary celebrations at the beginning of…
If you ever wanted to know what it feels like living in the dark ages come to China right about now. Seemingly in timing with the 20th anniversary of the 1989 “incident” (as they call it around here) many popular international websites have been blocked (including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger & Hotmail) and anything that isn’t blocked is loading at a snails pace probably due to extra filtering/monitoring going on. As a citizen of the internet this makes me mad and not just because I can’t share my inane thoughts with random people online any more but because I know full well that the anniversary will pass here and no one will bat an eyelid. Whether they don’t know or don’t care…
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 updated for 21st Century China (and my current mood): Photo by wvs Oh Great Firewall shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, I shalt compare thee to a thorn in my backside. Thou art more restrictive and more disruptive. Rough connections do shake the darling congress of March, And 1989′s memory hath all too long a block. Sometime too hot the eye of CPC shines, And often is Youtube’s complexion dimmed; And every post from BBS sometime declines, By chance, or golden shield’s changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal censor shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that power thou ow’st, Nor shall freedom brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.…
The world economic crisis created in America is having knock-on effects around the world. As people in the west stop spending so the demand for manufactured goods from China is slowing down putting millions of migrant factory workers out of work.While the government does it’s best to keep the lid on free speech which might insight civil unrest the people still find other forms of expression to vent their feelings and resist censorship (known locally as “harmonization“) through the use of allegory, puns and seemingly innocent comics or videos. The following comics appeared in my inbox today humorously depicting the every-day impact of the economic crisis and how people have reacted in China (which some friends helped me translate). Each should be read from top to bottom…
Last year I talked about using Tor to bypass the internet censorship in China but the problem is that it’s painfully slow, almost to the point of being unusable. There are other options such as anonymous proxy servers (again slow) and corporate private networks but for most individuals these are not an option and fiddly to configure. I have however discovered another alternative which provides both security, stability and speed – it’s not free but certainly isn’t expensive either. Enter Witopia personalVPN – costing $59.99 per year this basically creates an encrypted tunnel out to Witopia’s secure internet gateway giving you unlimited access to the internet without any blocks or restrictions. Set up is simply a matter of installing a simple piece of software…