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.
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.…