BBC's Shanghai correspondent Quentin Sommerville goes to the Pingyang neighbourhood south of Shanghai and finds that the anti-Maglev protests have not quite abated. In his report [VPN required], he makes the following observation:
Rarely have protests in China been so well organised, or the protesters so well-dressed.
So in the meanwhile, Youtube remains blocked. Shanghai blogger John Pasden of Sinosplice informs us that Youtube wasn't the only unlucky fella. Revver.com and Dailymotion.com also appear to be hit. And of course Google Video was never accessible in China to begin with, so that's a no-count.
A man on the inside sent us this Brand Republic story from late last week. If you've ever wondered why bloggers never link to the South China Morning Post or why you don't see any stories from them on Google News, here's why:
Photo by Jakob.Montrasio.net taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page.
Shanghaiist contributor Micah has posted some information about the present and future of Wujiang Lu in the comments section of our post from yesterday. We thought they were worth highlighting.
So a writer from The Gazette, a popular Montreal newspaper, was in China recently. And he was awed by the same things that most writers who haven't been to China recently are awed by: the shiny skyscrapers, the intoxicating energy, the pirated DVDs. But the writer's trip to China also coincided with the "most exciting Quebec election in decades," and he desperately wanted to follow the news from back home. And thanks to this thing called "the internet" he was able to ... in Beijing. In Shanghai, he claims, it was a different story. Here is a snippet from the story, entitled "Don't try reading The Gazette online in fashionable, ultra-modern Shanghai":
As you probably have heard, a military coup in Thailand has seized power from Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. We are not going to pretend to have a solid grasp on Thai politics, so we will direct you to the thousands of stories about this over at Google News for the latest.
That was the subject line of an email Shanghaiist reader Gerard just sent us in response to our Gmail comment in today's "Extra! Extra!" post. Here is what he had to say:
Shanghaiist saw on the China Digital Times a post about the possibility that all Google.com traffic from China being routed to Google.cn, the censored evil twin of the famous search engine. This would mean that you would no longer get crappy Google.com service from within China, because it would no longer exist. CDT picked up this information from this report (in Chinese), which starts off with Google's license issues in China, but if you scroll down, you'll find the paragraph we're talking about. It says that a Google China official said privately to a reporter that the possibility of Google.cn taking over all Google.com directed traffic from within China was a distinct and even likely possibility. We shudder to think, but who's really surprised? Read more about it from Rebecca MacKinnon's website here. On a lighter note, we think Mark Fiore's animation about Western tech companies in China is pretty darn funny.
Have our worst fears been realized? Google.com isn't loading in Shanghai currently. It works fine using a proxy server. Google.cn is loading, but it is slow and its results are crap. Let's hope this is just a hiccup and not a full-on heart attack. This is not cool.
The deflector shield is now fully operational. Google just announced that it will be complying with the Chinese government's requests to censor its search results. Recall that in 2004, the mainland Chinese version of Google News was already censored. Now Google, has a new address -- www.google.cn -- and whereas before you could get the results of a search on Tibetan independence but not open the link, now, it seems, you won't even know it exists. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Some news snippets having to do with Shanghai landmarks and redevelopment:
Shanghaiist, by accident, realized today that Google News loads just fine -- without using a proxy -- here in Shanghai. We are no longer in the habit of visiting the site, because it's been blocked for quite some time, so we don't know for sure how long the site has been unblocked. One Shanghaiist friend even said Google News "is up to five times faster than any other site I try and visit." So make use of it now -- because you never know how long it will last.
The Chinese internet may or may not have 30,000 "web police" monitoring the Mainland's every click. But whatever their number, China's cyber thugs are really, really good at annoying the hell out of Shanghaiist. It seems now the screws have been turned on Yahoo! News, which was the only game in town since Google News was blocked way back when. Yahoo! News doesn't appear to be totally blocked in Shanghai -- sometimes it will load, but really, really slowly -- but it's pretty clear that someone's been messing with it, because up until a couple weeks ago it worked just fine. Others have noted that Yahoo!-owned Flickr has been a bit finicky of late, as well. Yes, there are ways around most of these problems -- but it's so fucking annoying. The internet in China -- definitely not a "harmonious society."
