[jaysay]

Originally Posted by blazey

In case you didn't notice, forums aren't necessarily blocked in China, so discussion isn't necessarily blocked out.

And you're right, people don't know things here that maybe they should know. People lack information on Tiananmen Square for example. The difference is that they know it exists, the use of proxy servers is pretty widespread here to access information that is censored, and generally they just choose to not bother finding out. I don't think it is a massive issue. The students that I've spoken to here don't mind it, and they live here. They've been pretty honest about how they feel about other things, so I don't see why they would lie about their feelings on censorship.

The whole Google thing here isn't an issue because it isn't China's biggest search engine. There are more popular social networking sites here than facebook as well so that isn't an issue for them. If anything, China isn't blocking discussion and information at all, it just wants to keep China as China, and not taken over by global companies. That is the impression I've got from the whole thing anyway.

And I couldn't get on either website through ordinary web browsing, but with the use of a proxy server I can. And it isn't a difficult thing to do here. Just not legal, but I suppose the nearest equivalent is downloading music illegally at home. Using bandwidth to facilitate the acquisition of information that is prohibited. The only difference is that we see different things as acceptable I guess. Nobody is harmed by not being able to access negative information here, just living in ignorant bliss I guess. Or that is the idea behind it at least

There is something very wrong when goverment keep the truth from the people, that could never happen here, could it