I found an interesting project that performs real time tests on websites to determine wether they are blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” and I was (somewhat) surprised to find that our very own blog was filtered:
Our ideas are considered subversive by the Chinese government! We must be must be doing something right (edit: see comments below)!
Any of our readers find their own sites blocked?
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
http://www.futureofthebook.com is available
in fact, i can visit your site, anytime in Beijing Of China.
the test is not exact, but i can not visit that project.
😛
i find the tone of this post to be problematic. first of all, in what way would being blocked by the chinese government indicate that we were doing something right. secondly, i’m not sure it means anything at all. i put harvard.edu into the test window and it came up blocked also. did you notice that the site says “This version, 1.0, may report sites as being blocked, while there are only technical reasons for their unavailability.”
Just to be clear:
“doing something right” was an intentionally absurd statement.
I got an email from someone who did not like the tone of my post and I just want to clarify that besides highlighting it’s absurdity, I was not taking a political position on the issue (though, I assumed it was implied). I was highlighting what I think is an interesting and valuable project, and was flabbergasted to find our site there.
Sorry if that was not clear or if I offended anyone, but I was certainly *not* celebrating the firewall.
—
On slightly different note, I take the same absurd tone about all forms of censorship. Just recently, I sent around an email to my friends and collages of a conservative think tank’s list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries” and laugh that some of my favorite books make the list, like ‘On Liberty’ by Mill or even while looking through Google’s list of banned books, most people will be surprised what’s there.
It’s not a celebration to be on such list, since most people’s reaction to such lists is “that’s banned?!”, but it’s an absurdity that such lists exists… I thought I was highlighting that, but it’s clear that next time I will need to be a bit more explicit.
While I was traveling in Beijing and Shanghai in 2005, right after the Harbin toxic spill, access to any blog on blogspot was blocked. However, I could post on my blog but could not access it from the URL. Strange?
Like all Blogspot sites, mine is also blocked here in China, but the thing I find most surprising is that my personal Facebook profile is blocked here and cannot be viewed by anyone in China unless they use a proxy server. My friends and I have trouble accessing my photos on my Facebook page too. Very weird, especially since I’m not politically active (just a language student here from the US) and have never really spoken out against the government of China. While my page does have a link to my blog, I removed it and nothing changed, so of course I put it back on…