Smart Firewall of China

China’s firewall seems to be showing signs of getting smarter. Weird things are happening that makes me wonder if one day the country will effectively block out most of the information that they do not want in, not matter how inane it is. How did I come to this conclusion? It’s the story of a website called Great Firewall of China.

The idea behind the site is quite brilliant. They set up a system so that you can check if a site is being blocked in China from any country in the world in real time. For a brief moment it was widely popular. Unfortunately, it was probably too popular for its own good. Within a week of really taking off, the authorities, ironically, blocked it. They did a good job too, as even through proxy server it did not work well.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I went to check out a friend’s site about traditional Chinese music called Silk Qin. It’s not exactly the type of material that you would expect the government to care much about—at least not in a negative. On the contrary, you would suspect they would be delighted to have foreigners promoting Chinese culture. It gives information about the guqin instrument, has sound bites, and overall is a fascinating find. And he’s not exactly giving out state secrets. You would think he’d be pretty safe.

You would think, but you would be wrong. When I clicked through the link the site was blocked. Most likely he was using a server through one of the big providers. The risk that you run with doing it that way is that if one site on the server is objectionable in the eyes of the all-knowing, then the whole thing goes down.

This brings us back to Great Firewall of China. No matter what he did, the site always said Silk Qin was down. When I was in New York I noticed that a new blog that I’m setting up (operational mid-November) also appeared to be blocked, which is odd because my sister and brother-in-law have a site on the same server, and I have never had a problem accessing. So I tested CNN, and then ESPN. Both came back as ‘blocked,’ even though neither is.

As it turns virtually all sites show up as blocked now, which I suspect means the government figured out a way to jam up their systems. I should mention that Great Fire Wall of China has a disclaimer reading: “This version, 1.0 may report sites as being ‘blocked’, while there are only technical reasons for their unavailability.” Nevertheless, the total blackout makes me suspect something more nefarious than technical issues.

So it’s back to the drawing board for those of us try to figure out which sites are blocked, and which are not. The best way is still to test it yourself from inside the country, or drop an email to a friend who can. Hopefully someone will come up with a system that is not subject to being blocked or jammed up, but with teams of government officials working to ensure that does not happen, we will have to keep plugging away for the time being. And since China does not claim to block any sites, making no comments on the topic, people are left wondering if they’ve done something ‘wrong.’

Related posts:

1. All Expats in China are Crazy III
2. China Briefing’s China Business Guides
3. China’s 50 Best Websites (After China Expat of course)

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