GFW, China's unique achievement

A few notes on web censorship in China following a week in Shanghai. As a rule I don't bother with a VPN when in (mainland) China, partly because the censorship doesn't hugely inhibit my work and partly because I object to being forced to take the trouble to do so.

There's also the big plus that by forsaking the tunnel through the GFW you can experience the censorship system that is perhaps the unique achievement of modern China. No other country has created such a powerful prophylactic against knowledge.

Sure, the online experience of a foreign knowledge worker hardly reflects that of the vast majority of Chinese internet users, whose interests lean far more to celebrity gossip and foreign TV shows. But you do become familiar with the arbitrary nature of the censorship - surely no accident. As well as being more cost-effective than permanent blocking it is disempowering and underlines the party’s omniscience.

One example: at my hotel in Pudong I was for the most part able to load Facebook on my laptop. But never on my phone. Whether this was a quirk of the hotel VPN or the local telco servers I don't know. Indeed, from my hotel I could access even the 1989 page on the Chinese Wikipedia.

Likewise, I could not load the Electric Speech Twitter account onto my handset, but had no trouble doing so on the laptop. My personal Twitter account was always accessible from both devices. Shrug.

Google Maps - far more useful than Baidu's erratic maps - was rarely accessible. Of the other Google sites, Calendar and Translate were nearly always available. But Google.com and Google.com.hk were extremely unpredictable, especially during the couple of days I spent on the Puxi side. In fact according to Greatfire, Google.com is fully blocked, the HK site is down just 33% of the time.

It was no surprise that I couldn't load the YouTube app on my phone or that the NY Times and Bloomberg sites were permanently out of bounds. I was at first taken aback that bit.ly links didn't work, although on reflection it makes perfect sense from the censor’s point of view. Naturally the English language reports on the detention of Zhao Huaxu were out of bounds. 

Final reflection: the problem with industrial scale web filtering is that it slows down the already-glacial transmission speeds. Indirectly perhaps the GFW has been an accelerant in China’s telecom thaw. As well as MVNOs and a mobile tower company, officials have even talked of opening up broadband to private investment.

Comments

[Rob]

As someone who lives the better part of each year behind the GFW, I can promise you that if you spent more time here you'd find the need to use a VPN. Not to view the stuff that is explicitly blocked, but for the vast number of randomly debilitating side effects. Of course, they have now proven their ability to shut down the VPNs as well when they want to through deep packet inspection.