JISHOU, HUNAN — Sometime in the last week, China’s Internet gatekeepers decided to block Facebook, thereby cutting off my students (and thousands of other Chinese users) from communicating with their Facebook pals.
I can still use FB, but now I have to go through the Tor proxy network. Whatta pain.
China’s net nannies have been on a campaign recently to lock down the Internet, obstensibly to shut off access to pornography, but coincidentally to limit access to sites critical of the government. Given the recent riots in Xinjiang between Muslim Uighurs and local Han (the ethnic majority in China), one can only guess why Facebook has been banned here.
The media site, www.danwei.com, is now also blocked, too. Danwei’s writers are openly critical of Internet censorship in China, and provide links to news sites that are less biased than the official government sources.
For example, if you believe CCTV-9, the international arm of the state TV media, everything is just peachy keen in Xinjiang, where more than 150 people were killed earlier this month and where the army is patrolling the streets to prevent more outbreaks of ethnic violence. CCTV-9 interviewed a Westerner who teaches at a university in Urumqi, the provincial capital, and who said categorically that there were no problems on campus and everything is back to normal. We also got to see a queue of Chinese residents stuffing 100-yuan notes into a donation box — the whole scene was patently contrived for the telecast.
JISHOU, HUNAN — Ever since I arrived here last fall, China’s net nannies have blocked Livejournal, the popular blog site. Mysteriously, today, I was able to visit my daughter’s blog with no problems.
WordPress.com is also now accessible. Just last week, it wasn’t.
Even more strange, I was briefly able to access a blogger.com site, then promptly lost that ability. The Great Firewall has been blocking blogger.com and blogspot.com for a couple of weeks now.
JISHOU, HUNAN — Lest its population catch wind of the true situation in Tibet, the Chinese government has blocked access to all of Youtube.com with China’s mighty Great Firewall.
It seems too many videos of Chinese soldiers beating Tibetan monks ended up on the video-sharing site.
The BBC has more details, but I can confirm I cannot access Youtube without running through the Tor network. Maybe the Tibetan resistance can put the videos on vimeo, too.
JISHOU, HUNAN — Bruce Wilson, at Talk to Action, has been researching the connection of Gov. Sarah Palin’s churches to an extreme Christian dominionist movement called the “Third Wave.” His team posted part of their documentary on YouTube, which killed the video just as it was creeping into the top 10 most viewed clips on the site.
The video, first of three parts, is now being hosted elsewhere.
Christian dominionism is a polite way of saying, “Christians taking over the US government, and maybe rewriting the Constitution to include ‘Biblical’ principles.” The Third Wave movement is even more extreme in these efforts, so much so that even conservative pentecostal churches are worried.
Both the Wasilla Assembly of God Church and the Juneau Christian Center appear to be part of the Third Wave movement. Wilson has many more details at Talk to Action’s website. Here’s the video, to pique your curiosity.
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