Randy Cassingham's Blog

Posted by Kim, Japan on October 27, 2007:

When my husband and I lived in China, it was before the quite recent "crackdown" on the Internet which I believe has greatly limited politically "sensitive" articles' or sites' access in China.

I think China is having one of its paranoid fits amidst a sensitive political climate. The current leaders want to look conservative enough to the old guard of the Party, and a visible crackdown on allowed Internet sites is a good way to do so.

However, I did also discover that some sites that people assumed were blocked by China's "Great Firewall" were, in fact, not.

A number of American ISPs block all of China, sometimes all of Asia, because of spam. China's internal internet security is ABYSMAL. They have open relays all over the place that spammers use to move their e-mail. So, the only solution that many ISPs have found is to just ban the IP range and be done with it.

An example of this, as of my last check, is the Voice of America website. You cannot reach this website from a lot of places in China because the IP ranges for those places is blocked by VOA's ISP.

I find this interesting because without some net savvy and a good amount of time to spare it's hard to find out who's blocking what.

As a housewife in China and a serious computer junkie, I had time so I got to look into it. It's interesting to think of what impact these kinds of censorship could have on a theoretically "open" Internet. I would say that governments and corporations alike have said Net Neutrality be damned. Of course, the reasons are very different -- one is political, the other economic -- but it's still working out similarly.

Posted by Richard, New York on October 27, 2007:

You refer to "mainland China." Is there another China?

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Absolutely -- I've already talked about Hong Kong and Macao, and it also does not include Taiwan. China probably considers Tibet to be part of the mainland; others don't. "Mainland China" is a geopolitical term that has been in use for 57 years. Try to keep up. :-) -rc

Posted by John, Glendale (AZ) on October 31, 2007:

Your note of the "secret" police. Um, besides being a little dramatic in phrasing, if you knew who they were, exactly how secret could they have been? ;)

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Note I mentioned that the locals told us about them. They're quite familiar with the sight. -rc

Posted by Meg, Oslo on November 6, 2007:

Tibet aside, you're lucky to access anything at Wikipedia at all, since it's one of those sites that usually gets wholly blocked by the Great Firewall. Over the past few years it's probably been blocked, unblocked, and reblocked more than any other website. Of the 1-1/2 years I lived in China, I think we had a grand total of 1 month of Wikipedia access!

Luckily, there are plenty of anonymizing sites to let everyone get around the censors. It's so common that I've even seen published media listings that included anonymized URLs since the sites were blocked!