Polyglot Incarnate

I don’t think any of us are strangers to China’s censorship. However, on my study abroad this summer one of the guys decided that he needed to google Tian’anmen Square. It was the first thing he looked up on the internet. Well, unfortunatly for him the web page didn’t exist. But no worries, nothing bad happened.

Going to China I anticipated not being able to us facebook, but I did not forsee Blogger being blocked, or my gmail account sometimes not functioning. I even made a blog just to post pictures, because I wouldn’t be able to mass-upload them to facebook in China. The good thing was that Skype worked in China. Sometimes the connection was bad, but it still worked. My parents were relieved every week that I had not been kidnaped.

While China has a reputation for censorship and harsh consequences, the Chinese people themselves have a reputation that trumps China’s: They know or can figure out all the ways to get around the Great Firewall. A few summers ago the method was proxy sites, then the government caught on and blocked those. Now it’s a VPN. With a VPN the internet runs slower but you can watch YouTube, get on facebook, blog…etc. But if the government senses you are trying to incite rebellion or even form a protest- They will shut you down. But no one is going to be that stupid in China. 

Well, unless it’s the native themselves. Critics of the Chinese government have code names for all of the leaders, or at least the equivalent of misspellings. The misspellings slip through the cracks and many people read them. Chinese people also use twitter to set up protests, one of which Jon Huntsman was found at. Much to our (as Americans) diplomatic embarassment.

This looks like it’s getting a little long for, well at least my attention span, on Tumblr anyway. So, I will discuss this a little further in a future post.

Signing off-

Alice