Whew! Well, folks, the NPC is finally over, and what a party it was! Well, it wasn't quite as fun as C-Span, but after all the sanctimonious sloganeering, we were pretty excited about the New Socialist Countryside, Harmonious Society, Peaceful Development, growing the economy and creating win-win situations for mutual benefit.
After so much excitement, we decided to cut-loose for a bit, and check-up on the latest banalities of everyone's favorite Shanghai deviant and scoundrel, but our connection timed out. "Well, that's happened to him before," we thought, and we went on to try a few other blogs. We first tried letting a few skeletons out of our own closet at PostSecret, but that didn't work and neither did XiaXue. By this point, we were getting a little nervous, so we went for something safe and checked Future Cars, Hybrid Cars, but still nothing. Then we remembered, something else we heard at the NPC.
With all of the excitement, it seems we almost forgot that the government is once again tightening the screws of internet censorship. Specifically, the new changes are targeted against China's bloggers and their 34 million blogs. LiveJournal was an early casualty of the new enforcement (they can't very well be called "rules," can they?), as well as Xanga, and now, it seems that BlogSpot has been blocked again.
If you wish to check for blocked sites, you could test for them here, if that site were not also blocked. Naturally, we here at Shanghaiist are absolutely thrilled with these developments, and we feel that the emperor's clothes are perfectly exquisite.



But Chinabounder, seemingly prepared for blogspot to be blocked again, mirrored his blog at
chinabounder.spaces.live.com
So you can still enjoy his banalities and gimcrack observations
anonymouse.org and dozens of other proxies work just fine though...
This is so sad. Since the fairly recent "unblocking" of blogspot, I've become addicted to a very mundane non-political blog (strobist.blogspot.com) and had been checking it every day. Now it's gone again. Hating.
Well, maybe it'll help stop my ex-boss from spying on me through my blog.
But this does damage my attempt at teaching English to Chinese through blogger.
you can visit pkblogs.com !
What a pain... and just when I was starting to think of making my Blog (Original Quality: robertnear.blogspot.com) into something popular. Oh well, at least I can publish and my friends in Canada,etc. can see it.
No need to worry gang, there are ways around the central government's firewall. The Chinese Government will lose in the end. hahahaha! Blogs shall rule the world! moohoohoohahahahaha!
I just hope they don't block YouTube...
I like using VPNs myself.
I'm glad Chinabounder has mirrored his blog on another provider and that proxies can be used as a workaround, but Blogspot and Livejournal must have lost many local readers.
It's really important that local blogs are setup on independent domains that can be easily rerouted in the event that they start facing unacceptable timeout errors! I know Sinosplice has written about choosing hosting platforms and I chose Dreamhost, because they were cheap and had been recommended by him.
I wonder how many local bloggers register with the government.
"Nothing is blocked in China", as mentioned by the Chinese representative at the recent Internet Forum in... France? Can't quite remember. (I think Shanghaiist wrote about this or linked to a transscript of the proceedings)
So remember folks, nothing is blocked, you're just having technical problems accessing it...
...I love the way they expect the world to believe that. Hilarious.
I'd save the city...if I could only get out of bed.
Yes, we did write about that denial a while ago here:
China blows minds at Athens IGF
There are also some good alternatives offered in this post, as well as in the comments:
Tunneling through the Great Firewall of China
The new craze among the Chinese students is to write an adventure interactively with the readers. There is no aim to step on any toes, just to establish a channel to tell about their lives, thoughts and hopes to global audience. On the surface the blog seems quite innocent but everyone tries of course to read hidden messages between the lines...
So far the authorities have not reacted. The "Krem Trekker Diaries" is published in English at: www.kremtrekker.com
Blogspot now seems to be open again in China.
blogspot was blocked!
we have to use other ways to visit blogspot in CHINA.someone teached people to change their host file for visting blogspot freely.
what about "pkblogs.com",I tried the domain and not worked.It says "No input file specified."
It's a shame of our Gov.There is always a tall WALL divides CHINA from the world.
poor blogger~~~~~~~ }:(