Monday, May 16, 2011

China and Internet

You know what I just noticed? I've had visitors from pretty much all over the world on this blog. Just today there was one visitor from the Palestinian Territories, one from Cambodia, four from Serbia, two from Saudi Arabia, one from Tanzania, thirteen from Indonesia, one from Bahrain, and so on.

I haven't had a single visitor from China, though. Not just today but ever. I don't remember ever seeing a single visitor from China here. Are all these reports about the growing popularity of the Internet and blogging in China just lies? I know that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are banned, but are people even prevented from using Google?

The saddest thing, of course, is that now, when the US owes over a trillion to China, nobody will even try to mention human rights violations in that country.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I was still blogging, I had at least one who visited regularly.

I think it may have more to do with the language barrier than anything else.

Clarissa said...

The language barrier can't be bigger than the one in Bahrain and Cambodia, I think.

Tim said...

The reason you have never had a visitor from china (at least one using a chinese access point) is that you are being BLOCKED by the chinese government.

Buharharhar. These people are up to your doing Clarissa and they are not amused.

Now, fun aside, the truth is, your page is truly blocked. All blogspot.com spaces are, because the chinese don't want their people blogging*.

You can try it out here:
http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org

* blogspot.com is blocked, but wordpress.com is not.

Clarissa said...

Wow, I had no idea. This is because of the issues China has been having with Google, right?

There is nothing even remotely redeeming about the horrible disease of communism.

karnak said...

I don't think the blocking is because the the row with Google. The row was over censoring search results, not websites. And blogger has been blocked in China since much before, as far as I can recall. They just don't like people speaking out there minds over there.

Anonymous said...

I used to live in China, and can verify that at the time I was there, all the blogspot/blogger sites were blocked.

-Mike

Tim said...

Interestingly though neither wordpress.com or tumblr.com are blocked. Other services from google, like google.com, youtube.com or orkut.com are blocked. So I would rather say that this is a china vs google thing. Doesn't make it any better though.