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Explore the Web From China

Posted by samzenpus on from the walking-in-somebody-else's-shoes dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Download.com: "It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Fear by Enderandrew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can it recreate the fear that making the wrong post on a blog will get you arrested?

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  2. Re:Answer: Proxy by cyberon22 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are people really going to develop web applications for Chinese users and not host them in China? Do they think Chinese users surf a lot of English language content on budget shared hosts?

    Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.

    Once you know the language you can get out into the actual Chinese Internet. Find out the difference between Baidu and Google. Have Tencent screw up your computer. Watch videos on youku and surf chat forums. It takes time to get to the point where this is comfortable for second language speakers, but Chinese is looking a lot more valuable than banking at this point.....