BoingBoing reader Ben Lehman, who lives in Shanghai, writes this response to yesterday’s post comparing the results of censored versions of search engines in China:
I live in Shanghai right now, and I’ve lived in several other parts of the country and also done a lot of travelling over the last few years. I’m also a huge geek, so I’ve spent a fair amount of my time in smoky internet cafes between the QQ chatters and MMO players.
The censorship of large, famous portal websites like Google, MSN, and Baidu is the most visible aspect of Chinese censorship to the outsider, but I consider it really secondary to the firewall. I think that, for Americans, it’s a big deal because it’s big, public, and most importantly American companies that are involved. But, in day to day life, the internet in China is just smaller than it looks.
The thing that most people outside of China don’t seem to get, and which your article missed, is that the firewall is maintained on a district-by-district basis. There are sites I can get to from my neighborhood of Shanghai that I can’t get to at the coffee shop downtown. Likewise, moving provinces or counties results in a whole new wave of censored sites. Blogspot is inaccessible to most of the country, but totally open from rural Shandong. American Google and Gmail are available most places … until the neighborhood cadre wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and turns them off for a week. Some parts of the country all you can get to is QQ and sina.com — you can’t even get to the official Chinese government site!
(Of course, access to some sites — places like human rights watch and the US dept. of State — is cut off by central government mandate. But the rest is pretty damned flexible.)
The insidious thing about this is not the censorship (getting around the firewall is so trivial I can’t even begin — it’s even less effective than the last “big wall” China built to keep out foreign influence) but the fact that most Chinese people don’t even know its there. Almost no one I’ve talked to even understands that government censorship happens at all — it just looks to them like the internet has a lot more “dead links” and, if that’s all you’re used to, there’s no reason to expect otherwise.
A lot of times foreigners see China as a big monolithic nation, but the central government actually has little direct control, and most things (including censorship) are entirely in the hands of local officials.