Beijing Craps Itself
And so ended the great internet experiment. With the “excitement” in the western part of the country, internet sites have been getting blocked left and right (or at least there is an amazing series of coincidences).
While the NY Times and Washington Post seem to be working fine, here are some of the sites that seem to be down. Keep in mind that with some of them you can get to the front page, but not actual articles (or access pages requiring logging in):
- LA Times
- Washington Times
- Yahoo!Mail
- BBC
- Associated Press
- YouTube
- Reuters
- [update] Google Reader
- [update] iTunes Store
Several of these are unavailable even through proxy servers. Other sites are so slow to load that it’s hard to tell if they are working or not. [update] The Economist is claiming to be the only officially sanctioned foreign media outlet in the area that we are not mentioning. Here is their piece, which actually portrays the Chinese response quite positively.
Only a few months out from the Olympics, clearly this is a tremendously inauspicious development, and Beijing appears to be panicking. Even as Western governments try not to condemn the government for what’s going on, it’s hard to imagine how this turns out well.
For obvious reasons (i.e., I don’t want to end up on the aforementioned list), I request that any comments avoid using words that might raise alarm bells, although I encourage an open, coded dialogue. Such is life in China.
At the end of the day, all I know is that Beijing is crapping itself, and that’s bound to leave the country a stinky mess.
[update] The LA Times appears to have an interesting story about how Chinese are lapping up the state media coverage (like this). I say “appears” because I can only see glimpses of the headline before it zonks out.
[UPDATE: I wrote more, but then MY site disappeared. Hopefully the removal of the offending material will get this site back up here. Basically I had a block quote from this English article and this Chinese one, both Chinese media sites, and that got me banned. They don't even trust what they spit out there, but what can you do?]
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nanheyangrouchuan responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 12:24 pm →
And this isn’t even factoring the free fall in the Shanghai stock market, where most middle and upper middle class Chinese have dumped their savings to ride the stock roller coaster.
Bah mantou!
theotherrichard responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 1:09 pm →
I have found the BBC’s streaming audio service to be covering the issue and entirely unblocked but the video went out on the Regent hotel BBC World feed this morning during a sensitive report. Interestingly a full and quite explicit report from a reporter on the ground across the southern border was left in tact but a round-up from the Beijing correspondent discussing central political reaction was not.
eric responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 5:21 pm →
its really annoying not being able to log on to yahoo mail, since it is my main email. really, yahoo mail?
if the new york times is working fine, why should yahoo mail be banned? i dont get it.
Bobby responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 5:42 pm →
Yahoo!Mail seems to be working now, although it’s been frustrating all day. Ditto for Facebook. The others still seem to be down, and video on my sites hasn’t been working.
Read all your mail now!!
Nick responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 6:31 pm →
I’m in Suzhou. You can add The Guardian and BoingBoing.net to your list. After a few provocative google searches trying to search alternative views on recent events I was unable to access google for 15 of 20 minutes. Beijings solution is part of the problem.
b. cheng responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 9:09 pm →
hmm, its so strange, I didn’t have a problem with facebook all day and other than youtube, almost everything is available in some form or another. Granted, there are some news stories, mostly those involving a guy living in India who has a 2 word title, that were totally unreachable, even through anonymouse (and now even chinalyst needs to be anonymiced)…
Larry responds:
Posted: March 17th, 2008 at 11:05 pm →
“portrays the Chinese response quite positively”
I am really glad that the Economist is living up to their end of the bargain in this on location media deal. There will be a lot of opportunities for Economist in China yet.
Zhongguoist responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 10:19 am →
Some of the websites that are blocked seem to go in and out of being visible. So the guardian I kept refreshing the offending pages and managed to read in full detail about what’s happening. Youtube doesn’t seem to work at all now. BBC News never worked for me(I don’t have a proxy now) Facebook I can login but it’s dreadfully slow.
Tor Use it and be free responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 11:37 pm →
To go anywhere on the internet use Tor. I can go anywhere.
Install Firefox
Install TOR go to http://www.torproject.org/
Install NoScript as an add on
Install RefControl as an add on
Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, hr workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens.
nanheyangrouchuan responds:
Posted: March 19th, 2008 at 1:19 pm →
This guy looks like a clown…
Georgey Porgey,
Pudding and pie,
Turned his back on the [people from west China] and let them die…
And that goes for wet noodle Brussesl, beer sucking London and passed-out-drunk Oz as well.
Perhaps the first real sign of the The End of Times is that all of mankind’s institutions built to promote and protect the preciousness of human life have simultaneously failed. The UN, the IOC, DC, Brussels, the US media as a whole, etc