China's "great firewall" faces new opposition

The Chinese government's censorship of a wide array of non-political websites has generated a popular backlash, according to this NYT item:

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

Link.

• [mrccos]

  I was recently in China on a business trip and was very surprised to find that BoingBoing is fine but Wikipedia is blocked. I was trying to do some work on blogroll maintenance and wasn’t surprised that pretty much anything with the word “blog” in it was blocked through.

• [Takuan]

  is BoingBoing blocked?

• [Burns!]

  I thought at one point I had read here that BoingBoing was blocked in China, but I was there in November ’07 and didn’t have any trouble accessing the site.

• [coaxial]

  @burns!

  I have to got there in april, it will be interesting to see if it is. Of course, I’m already planning to setup a proxy so that I’ll be unencumbered.

• [Jack Zarnett]

  Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China. jack zarnett