Week Around the Ists
Interview: Coco Zhao, from jazz to M. Butterfly
Cinematheque: Mulan is finally Chinese again! (and other film news)
Protest in Guangzhou: Why would you burn garbage?
This irks us almost as much as that really terrible opinion piece on Xinhua that poked fun at Facebook's "gloomy" status in China without ever mentioning that the service has been blocked. Guess who's on Facebook (and fellow blocked social networking tool Twitter)? The World Expo.
Yes, we get that the World Expo is supposed to be an international event so it makes sense that its promoters would use sites that will get the word out to English language speakers, even as its host government silently stops its netizens from accessing those very sites. It doesn't mean we can't be annoyed.
We wonder what VPN the World Expo organizers use to keep facebooking/twittering. We also wonder if this means that the GFW will drop the Facebook and Twitter ban come May 2010. After all, wouldn't it be a shock to all those foreigners who've excitedly become fans of WorldExpo2010, only to realize they can no longer check their fave websites for keeping up with WorldExpo2010 news?
Thanks @ShanghaiTattoo
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
post to facebook
Is that really them though? A quick search on Facebook brings up loads of results for people/groups calling themselves Shanghai World Expo 2010 - how do we know which (if any) are genuine?
Oh, and if it really is the government doing it, do you reckon they're using the Falun Gong VPN thing?!
That Xinhua article is really quite something.
"Why do I think Facebook and its foreign-born likes would have gloomy prospects in China?... It's because the primary purpose of the majority of Chinese Internet users is to find entertainment from the Web."
Talk about ignoring the elephant in the room.
GFW will never give chineses any chance
I notice that @shanghaidaily is still tweeting away incidentally and theirs does seem like a genuine account