Great Firewall springs a leak: Chinese flood Obama's Google+ page
Free speech? In China?
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China’s infamous tool of internet censorship the Great Firewall appeared to fail last week, allowing hundreds of web users in the People’s Republic to access and post comments on US president Barack Obama’s Google+ page.
Google’s social networking service is blocked in China – like many other sites including Facebook and Twitter – for fear that it could provide a platform for social and political dissent. The Communist Party enforces its stance with a range of country-wide internet monitoring and IP-blocking technologies collectively known as the Golden Shield Project.
However, the leader of the Western world’s Google+ page was flooded with users posting in the simplified Chinese of the mainland from Friday, with content reportedly focused on issues of democracy and censorship in China.
Of those posting in English, some were clearly just happy to be there, while others used their time on the site to asking for freedom for political prisoners such as blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.
Several more claimed they were staging their own tongue-in-cheek ‘Occupy’ protest on the president’s Google+ page.
Another, clearly astonished at the sudden influx of Mandarin on the site, wondered aloud whether Google had been bought by Baidu overnight.
Some claimed that Google+ had been available in China since the beginning of the week, although most comments in Chinese appeared on posts on Obama’s page from Friday through to Sunday. It’s pretty clear from reading them that he’s more popular in China than in the US at the moment.
The party may be over for those Obama-mad Chinese web users, however, with online censorship monitoring site greatfire.org claiming that the pages are now being blocked as usual.
It’s still unclear what caused the failure of the Golden Shield. While it’s one of the most sophisticated and large-scale systems of its kind on the planet, it’s not infallible – although this has certainly been the most high-profile breach in recent memory. ®
COMMENTS
I live in China
It may be a developing country, but it sure has a lot going for it at the moment. There are both exceedingly rich and exceptionally poor people here; everyone, other than gold diggers try to work. The only shortfall is quality, business here tends to reach a certain level of success and then the people who run it don't seem to care as it has made them money.
This in turn (with a strange logic) loses a lot of customers, loyal customers still pay/go though...Until, the business pushes up the price to deal with a loss of customers which loses the loyal customers at which point the business closes. Very few businesses do any marketing at all after they open. The place I work has paid attention to this "fashion" and my words, it rises like the year this dragon itself is.
In short, China REALLY doesn't need any Western influence. Please, don't take this the wrong way, people in China laugh at the majority of Americans as both shameless and quite pathetic on their worldly outlook. Happily, I am English though and we as a race are seen as quite proper and gentle when times are warm; purposeful and firm when times are tough.
After being here for so long, after a lot of reflection, England (that's us) really needs to turn away from Americans quite a lot and rediscover that which once made us a great nation...It's called pride and hard work.
Re: Shhhhhhhhhh
Democracy you say,?
Certainly, sir.
How does one intend to pay, tankers or would sir like a pipeline fitted?
And will politicians in the West complain or do anything? No.
What would you have them do, declare war on China to overthrow the government and implement a Western ideology? At best the West could attempt to support a populist uprising against the Communist government - without massive popular support from within China there'd be little chance of victory ... and without that support how would you justify the invasion?
It doesn't really matter what type of government is in power, it's only there by popular consent... do you really think that the government/military in China would be able to stop 1 billion+ Chinese people from overthrowing them if they really, really wanted to? If those billion+ people were prepared to sacrifice their lives to depose the government.
There's nothing the governments in the West can, or even should, do - it's not "our" country - change can only come from within.
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