Saturday, September 13, 2008

Great Firewall of China, Olympics Version

Since the Olympics and the accompanying rush of foreign journalists, China has been letting up on the GFoC. Since arriving in Beijing, I've been able to read/post to my blogger.com blog and I can still read the Chinese version of BBC, which I heard has been blocked since the beginning. However, all is not free in China. I just tried to get a bible verse from the Bible Gateway, and got the familiar "webpage not available" error. I guess foreign new sources are okay for now but not religious websites; I don't think it even has Chinese versions of the bible.

Just to be sure, I tried looking up "tiananmen" in Google.com (not Google.cn) and the first link was a Wikipedia page in English. I clicked and it did come up, with the picture of the "Tank Man" and everything. However, when I tried to click on the "中文" link on the left for the Chinese version, it was blocked. The Chinese government is probably counting on the fact that the average Chinese citizen can't read English very well. Not sure what they will do when all that English education begins to pay off. It's probably a moot point anyway; they will go back and re-block everything once the Paralympics are done and all the foreign journalists go home.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chinese version bibles are everywhere on the net.Just give you a reference web link:
http://www.o-bible.com/gb/hgb.html

You can use the google or baidu to search it.

totochi said...

Thanks... but that's not the point. Why is the site blocked in the first place? Even more confusing if you can find Chinese bibles online. Why block non-Chinese versions of the bible then?

Anonymous said...

English version bibles are also everywhere. For your reference:
http://www.bible.com/

Some time you had a problem to log on some website. Perhaps it is not because it is blocked but because of the problem of server or congetion of internet.

I don't mean that the Chinese government doesn't block anything. But it seems that it is improving.

The following website is out of your imagination:
http://chinesememorial.ning.com/

http://chinesememorial.ning.com/group/1989

Just for your reference.