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.
I'd imagine the reporters from other countries will not be censored, through the great firewall or otherwise. If so, they must have a devil of a time separating the chinese from the reporters. Anyone heard anything on this?
On my first trip to China several years ago, the expats I met complained bitterly about the firewall. When I was there last summer, however, it seems that the use of Tor has widely spread in the expat community and now anyone wishing to read English-language media has no problem accessing it.
huh? I get all my news from Pravda. They're very impartial. Unless you're a capitalist pig dog. Which you aren't, are you comrade?
Thank God. China will finally have easy access to Dr. Who.
Upon first witnessing the glory and splendour of unfiltered media, they casually, whimsically, decided to destroy it, remarking, "It'll have to go".
what's the point?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I love the tag at the bottom of the article:
Are you in China? What is your reaction to this story? Is this your first time reading the BBC News website?
Followed by a block to enter your name, address and phone number. Yea right, that's a good idea, log on with your real info and complain about how your government censors you....and leave your contact info.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I am posting my comment from China right now, and I can tell you that [xxxxx] [xx] [xx] [xxxx] and [xxxxxxx] [xx] [xxxx] BBC [xx] [xxxx] so that [xx] [xxx] [xxxx] [xx] [xx] [xxxxx] Chinese government. What I can't figure out is, why is this the only article on Slashdot today? Slow news day? Hmm.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
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.
A win for China, they finally get to watch Mr Bean!
As I lived in China for 3 years, you can surf most English foreign media websites like CNN, New York Times, etc., most of the times. They don't really care. Because if you are so fluent in English, you already know all about human rights and you are likely a member of the better-off class. In China, like everywhere else, the people that want to and will revolve against the government are the poor people -- never the middle class or rich people. Remember who in the U.S. joint the L.A. riots in the 1990's?
In China, they are most interested in blocking oversea/HK/Taiwan Chinese sites. Like sina.com is a Chinese company operating two sites -- one for domestic and others for oversea with contents not allowed in China.
I tried to watch a couple of shows online from the BBC website but I wasn't allow because I don't live in the UK, I was blocked by the BBC itself.
Yaa, it's always the slant-eyed reds who won't bow down to the US who are the censoring types who kdawson has to post "news" articles about again and again and again. Never mind that people in the US who sell PAID-FOR satellite access to Al Manar are thrown into prison to rot. Never mind that the Great Firewall of China was mostly built not in China but by the largest companies dotting the San Francisco Bay area. As Easter just ended, a quote from old JC - look not for the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own.
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.
The current Tibet situation is probably also a factor in the dropping of the BBC block. "What?!?!," you're probably saying, "But China likes to hide that kind of stuff from their citizens, they don't like news getting out about unrest." Ahh, but this is a special situation.
When it comes to Tibet, the more Western media that gets in the better for the Chinese government. There is an intense vein of nationalism in China when it comes to Tibet. With outpourings of rage about "biased" western media, distorted facts, and CIA plots to break up China. The more Tibet-sympathetic reports that come from the West and leak in the China, the stronger this nationalism seems to get, and the more the people, even the poor, rally around their government.
My other half is a Chinese national, we've had some very intense conversations lately, and she's sent me links to views coming out of China about the Tibet situation. Ordinary Chinese see this as a direct attack on their sovereignty.
Many Chinese are learning English, especially the under 20 crowd. In the major eastern cities it's now required for all students in elementary school. If the government can channel their unrest against the Imperial West who's trying to break up their country, it takes the heat off the government. The Chinese government has long used nationalism, an us vs. them mentality, to deflect attention from itself domestically.
Of course they certainly wouldn't be the only country doing this, it's a long standing tradition for any unpopular regime. If you can draw this line between you and another group, and get your people to rally around you on some point, you can easily manipulate and pacify a population.
I will suggest you to do two things: (1) get a travel visa to China, go to a large city like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and visit some English corners (if you don't know where to find one, try google; (2) start learning written Chinese and visit the discussion forums of Chinese news website like sina.com for sometimes, especially for discussions about corruption cases, housing prices, or even news when the stock market heads down.
(1) will show you who and how many people are fluent in English; (2) will show you if people there know about "democracy", "freedom" and "equality" and if people can criticize the government or not. don't take my words here. go try the above two things. Of course, you can also choose just to listen the mainstream opinions you have heard from CNN and Slashdot -- that's your right as well.
Thanks for the laugh. You are confusing freedom with people being impressed with a (relatively) large penis.
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I am an American, living in China. While it is nice to see the BBC unblocked, I know that I will still have to use ssh to be sure I am seeing the real, unfiltered, content. Thanks to the nice Cisco (American) technology we developed for them, they are able to selectively block and redirect individual articles.