TripDingo

As most (especially foreign) internet users in China are aware, large chunks of the internet are regularly unavailable to view or use without some sort of proxy service. This can get really annoying for those looking for porn or regard the BBC as an authoritative news source. It can also prevent people from using Wikipedia to substantiate every argument they use for any internet debate, trolling, or flame-war they’re engaged in. 

While perusing Danwei this evening, I came across a short list that may be helpful for reminding us of what is blocked by the Great Firewall (GFW) or “Net Nanny” (which is not to be confused with the actual www.netnanny.com, I think):

Blocked sites
Wikipedia
Wordpress blogs
Livejournal
Opera blogs
Typepad blogs—although Typepad.com itself does not seem to blocked

Partially blocked or filtered
Large parts of the BBC website are unaccessible
Flickr—some photos on older servers do not load properly
Google.com’s Image Search and News are unreliable in China and seem to be heavily filtered

Blogspot has popped on and off the list randomly throughout the past and frankly, I wouldn’t bet on it staying available in China for long. Xanga seems to still be down as well which, at one point in time about 1.5 years ago, it wasn’t before. Google’s Image Search is particularly annoying for me, especially when it works for a bit then suddenly becomes red X hell.  

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Elliot Ng, the VP of Marketing for Kango.com (who sponsors this blog) and having quite a few exchanges about the China blogosphere, entreprenuership, travel, technology, Shanghai nightlife, and the flows of information between China and the West (amongst many other things). Fantastic guy and I want to bake cookies for him already but I’ll jump straight into what I want to talk about in this post by referencing a post of his over at his blog, CNReviews.com:

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Elliot then goes on to give an “especially clear” example of this one-sided “awareness” where a marketing director for a Chinese company shared that she watches the American TV shows Prison Break and Entourage. 

I have a few problems with Elliot’s statement (which I’m sure likely stems just from the lack of precision when using certain terms). For one, how are we defining “awareness?” Awareness of what? Of popular media entertainment? Social trends? Political trends? Societal values? Business environments? Professional norms? History? What? I could go on and on. Granted, there are more Chinese (absolute and per capita) who have exposure to American popular media than vice versa but is that sufficient to generalize “awareness?”  (more…)