Slashdot Mirror
China Unblocks the BBC (In English)
An anonymous reader writes in with news that China has unblocked the BBC Web site — the English-language version at any rate. No announcement was made, because China has never acknowledged blocking the BBC for the last decade. The Chinese-language version of the site has been blocked since its inception in 1999. The article speculates that the easing of censorship may be tied to the upcoming Olympic Games.
The conventional wisdom is that in the lead up to, and during, the olympics that Great Firewall is going to be deactivated for those with IP addresses originating in parts of Beijing where foreigners are expected to be. The idea is that foreigners will come to China, not see anything a miss and then go back to their home countries and spread the false impression.
It's a page right out Chairman Mao's playbook. When Nixon went China, the handlers routinely gave people on the street transistor radios to listen to. That way Nixon and Kissenger would say, "Wow. What a nice scene. China truly is wonderful place." Then as soon as these people were out of sight of dignitaries, goons (I'm sorry, "the advance team") would collect the radios for redistribution to other Potemkin Villages.
As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was."
I'm going to be in Beijing next month in a hotel down by the Bird's Nest. I'm going to have to check out the Great Firewall.
Whenever I visited China, I always had a feeling of playing cat and mouse with the unseen and much hypothesised great firewall. BBC back then? no chance. but you could hunt around and use other UK based new sites - daily main, guardian, thesun (if desperate), the times. Sometimes they would grind to a halt and I imagined my unseen monitor in the great firewall office checking what I was doing - then, as if he/she decided I was not a subversive threat, it would spring back into life. Other times I would VPN or proxy and find any site I wanted - but at a pitifully slow rate as if everything I did was intercepted and checked by my unseen intermediary. Other fun things that had odd effects on the speed on which pages would load would be to proxy them through the dialectizer - I always imagined one severly culterally puzzled state firewall operator calling his boss. The 'net access was always different depending on where I hooked up - im the 5* hotel in shezhen was always the fastest, in the office soso, in a street cafe you could forget it.
My conclusion was that the firewall was very very definately real, and the moment it found a foreign news story, the wrong keyword then suddenly wierd timelags and delays in page lookups would occur as my unseen companion blocked or cleared at whim. I also could of sworn that the system could tell the difference between the net being accessed from a posh hotel occupied by Western Engineers and a street cafe.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
There is strong belief that the Dali Lama was an illegitimate monarch who enslaved his people. And it's fascinating how the West and China see him so completely differently. Cruel dictator? The Dali Lama? Surely not.
But of course listening to arguments on why there IS democracy in China is fascinating too.
She did admit that one reason for the invasion was to create a defensive barrier, to take control of a strategic area when it came to mountain fortification. But yes, the idea of historic control of Tibet by China, by that argument Italy should claim control of most of Europe, they controlled it 2000 years ago (a longer claim then China over Tibet). And from the history I've read, for parts of this period, the control was the other way around - Tibet controlled large parts of China, they weren't always pacifist monks.