Purging Bloggers: The Great Firewall of Chinois

Maintaining a blog is difficult in Chinois. For one, Google’s Blogspot – the Internet’s most popular blogging domain – was nationally blocked until only yesterday by the Great Firewall of Sina. This has made my first few weeks here excruciatingly difficult; that is, not being able to consult my compulsory style blog, the Sartorialist, especially when temperatures range between 1-23˚C within 12 hours.

But of course, Mother knows best, and the Great Firewall – an array of the world’s most advanced firewalls and server routers, piloted by a virtual Red Army of an estimated 30,000 techno-police – was set up “to keep the world clean for God.” But when you have Mother, who needs God!?

The majority of these techno resources are put to use assuring a high level of morality against perversions such as pornography, paedophilia, the BBC’s journalism standards and of course, Miranda Devine’s SMH column. However, a great number is also devoted towards liquidating the fourth estate. Mother’s hackers spin their way across the Web, searching keywords, tracing IP addresses and with algorithms, instantaneously and automatically block domains in order to restrict access to particular topics, such as, hmmmmm… well I can definitely think of three that begin with “T”.

At the end of the day, there is an ever-growing string of mainstream websites that are often privy to the government’s omniscient censorship. Such include Wikipedia (after not removing a dubious article on one of the “Ts”), YouTube (clearly to protect brain cells), the British Broadcasting Corporation, Amnesty International, Reporters Sans Frontiers, Blogspot and from time to time the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. One can test which sites are blocked in Chinois by visiting http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/, which, conveniently, is also blocked. And of course, there are many others blacklisted, from the purely irrelevant to the particularly noxious – again, Miranda Devine.

Interestingly though, Blogger – Blogspot’s co-dependent sister domain – was not, and to my knowledge, has never been, blocked. This is significant because with Google’s blogging program, blogs are uploaded through Blogger’s domain, but then viewed through Blogspot. For example, I can login to Blogger to format and edit the Culture Spoon, however its domain remains culturespoon.blogspot.com and hence, blacklisted.

So, until very recently, we in the Chinois region – when using Google’s Blogger – could author blogs, but not view them. So why this selective discrimination? Does Mother’s army of technocratic-spies lack the acumen to suppress Blogspot’s two domains – one for input, one for output?

One theory – opined to me under the breath of a slightly disgruntled British journalist, recently removed from one of those places whose name begins with “T” – is that Mother doesn’t mind her children blogging. After all, it increases their literacy and hence, economic functionalism. At the same time, blogging is the favourite past time of Western journalists and bored Occidentals, and of course, Mother doesn’t want to suppress ALL that they have to say, especially when it’s something favourable or touristy.

So at the end of the day, people will write; it’s a question of who and what is read, and Mother – with the most sophisticated communications surveillance in the world – can at least successfully police this within her own home.

Now, allow me to offer a slightly more cynical and sinister speculation. That allowing blogging – one of the nation’s recently acquired favourite pass times – is an opportunity for Mother to easily detect those questionable elements that attempt to stir the otherwise peaceful surface of la disposition Chinois. Just as witches float, dissenters speak up, and in doing so will rise from the midst of the unconscious masses.

This most recent unblocking of Blogspot comes right on the heels of Mother’s most recent triumphant purge, in which she sent to jail, for three and a half years, a certain dissident – a human rights advocate and prolific blogger – for inciting subversion towards his homeland. Armed with no more than a blog, said dissident lambasted Mother for not keeping her promise to improve human rights conditions leading up to the coming 0lympia.

So then why open the blog gates now? Because with this latest incident, those subversive communities (pro-democratis elements) will be fired-up after five long months of trial and a blanket ban on blog reading. Opening up the floodgate, for one, serves as a warning to those who are fearful to tread water, but also as an incendiary to those who are not. By creating a public discourse, Mother can see which of her children are behaving badly and punish them accordingly.

Now that's smart technocracy.