Does it merit mention anymore? Wikipedia is dead. The craptastic part is that even using the until-now infallible hack, it doesn’t work. Bullocks.
Danwei reports that Chinese IT bloggers are getting pretty pissed at the extreme measures the [*chingov*] is taking to assure a harmonious 17th Party Congress this coming October 15th.
The Danwei article makes mention of Wangjiangshuo’s blog, which is usually quite apolitical (is there anyone that’s written as much as he about Pudong International Airport? I owe him a debt of gratitude for helping me get back to Suzhou safely). He states:
It seems the pressure from top really makes people take it seriously. These days, all kinds of people are busy.
- Telecom companies are busy unplugging Internet cable for data centers one by one.
- Hosting companies that were already shutdown are either busy find out solutions for the closed sites, or handle waves of customer complains, or both.
- Those hosting company or sites which were lucky enough not have been shutdown are busy shutdown “interactive sites” themselves, to avoid the whole data center run into bigger problem.
- Bigger websites are preparing contingency plans about what they will do when they were shutdown.
- All kinds of small site webmasters, or independent bloggers are busy signing up hosting package from abroad (I would be interested to know how many more orders bluehost, dreamhost, or ipowerweb got from China these days).
- Bloggers hosting their blog on BSP can only keep their finger across and pray for their little blog.
If you ask me how I feel, as a blogger in China, I would say I am very very very frustrated about it.
This frustration seems to be echoing through the China blogsphere. That, at the very least, makes me happy. Not happy, of course, that my netbretheren are in a frustrating situation, but rather that they are standing up and creating dialog about it.
In a country where those that stand the tallest are the first to be cut down, everyone seems -rightly- afraid to state their opinions, no matter how much common sense they are woven from. But that seems to be changing, which is exactly why these blocks are happening in the first place (oh cycle of irony, you are a cruel mistress).
At some point the [*cpc*] is going to push too hard though, and they’re going to have the online equivalent of [*TAM*]. With less tanks, and more cartoon cops, to be sure.
Wow dude, we quoted the same chunk of the same article on the same day…
That’s because all laowai think alike. 😉
yeah… and as you feared last week, Feedburner is screwed now too. i’m getting the feed up to google reader, but when i click on the link it doesn’t work.
I should have made mention of that in the original post, as it’s a good point some people might not understand – as Google Reader (or, indeed, most RSS readers) is not located in China, it’ll have no problems pulling the feed.
So, it does lend itself to the obvious question – why the hell would the GFW even bother? With most major online readers being State-side, the block is little more than an annoyance.