Getting around the Great Firewall of China
By the Branta Webcrawler • May 12th, 2010 • Category: Brave New World, Editor's Picks, Essays, From the Interweb, In Brief
Country’s most popular blogger and critic hasn’t been blocked by government censors … yet
Mark MacKinnon/Globe and Mail
When Time Magazine opened an Internet poll earlier this year to determine the “world’s most influential person,” a name unfamiliar to most Westerners quickly shot toward the forefront of the 100-person list, leaving the likes of Barack Obama, Jon Stewart and Lady Gaga in his online dust.
By the time the survey closed, Han Han, a 27-year-old novelist, race car driver and bad boy teen heartthrob who also happens to be China’s most popular blogger, was second only to Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. Given the reach Mr. Han has among China’s 400 million Internet users, it could almost be considered an upset that he didn’t win the contest outright.
An even bigger surprise, given the here-one-day-blocked-the-next world of China’s Internet, is that Mr. Han’s blog is still available online inside China despite his penchant for writing scathing attacks on government policies he dislikes and officials he alleges are corrupt. In recent months, he has used the blog to support Google in its battle over censorship with the Chinese government, to criticize officials for not doing enough for students and families affected by a recent spate of violent stabbing incidents at schools, and to complain that the multibillion-dollar overhaul of his hometown Shanghai ahead of the recently opened Expo 2010 has made life worse for residents.
Read the rest of the article at The Globe and Mail
the Branta Webcrawler is a compiler of information discovered, recommended and retrieved from either the "real" world or the world which is both wide and webbed.
Email this author | All posts by the Branta Webcrawler
