Censorship Part One

Everyone over here has to make some mention of censorship while living overseas in China. Currently blocked sites of prominence (or at least interest) in China:

Wikipedia.org - Probably the best online encyclopedia out there.
Blogger, blogspot (some of them), Random Chinese blogs...
Yahoo Mail
Metanoiac!
All of Geocities & most "free hosting" websites.
& According to Matt from Metanoiac, George Washington University.
The BBC

What the government here fears the most is information. Simple as that. The internet has taken China by storm and has suddenly given people a much safer outlet to vent their frustrations.

At one time, the mere mention of anything wrong about Mao or the government landed one in the stockades, or worse, strung up and hung. Mao's "Red Guards" walked the streets looking for any signs of dissidents. Their mandate: "Now our goal is to smash those capitalist roaders in power, to criticize the reactionary bourgeois "authorities" in science, to criticize the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes, to transform education, to transform the literature and art, to transform all areas of the superstructure not matching the economic base of socialism, and to promote the strengthening and development of the socialist system" according to the bill, "Decisions on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution".

Today, that sort of paranoia isn't so present in everyday life. Instead, the gov't has learned to "use" the internet for their own purposes. Most people back home don't know of the extreme hatred the Chinese have of the Japanese. Periodically, when things domestically become a bit tattered & the populace feels angry, the gov't will throw out a little anti-japanese sentiment, and when the riots start, they're focused on the Japanese, thereby continually feeding the "nationalistic" sentiment of the people.

As of now, in order to access the above websites, one must go through a proxy connection, which eventually dies. And the Chinese government is getting better & better at blocking these anonymous connections. One of these sites is www.anonymouse.org and another list you can copy/paste from is proxy4free.com/. Some are good for an hour or so, while others may last you a day. If you're into the whole anonymous websurfing thing, try these. From over here, it's our gateway back to the west in some cases.