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One of the most important issues to me during my time away has been that of keeping connected. Both on an emotional level, with the people I care about, and in the sense of staying informed about what is happening in the world. I’m an information junkie, so being away from my constant media companions of Radio 4, BBC news online, my morning RSS hit and the generally free and readily-available internet access I enjoy at home has been irritating and sometimes difficult.

I do, of course, have access to the web in a limited capacity here in that I can use a (somewhat dinosaurish) computer in the English teaching office during the day (when it isn’t being used by someone else, and the school’s connection isn’t down or running prohibitively slowly), or alternatively can make a pilgrimage to one of the three Starbucks within a few blocks of one another along Xianggang Zhong Lu (that’s Hong Kong Middle Road to you and me) to linger over a latte and share their free wireless with a crowd of other laptop-wielding users. So I have been able to keep more or less in touch with things, though my use of the internet here constantly comes up against that vast and much-discussed virtual roadblock entertainingly known as the Great Firewall of China. It is, of course, much more fun to make puns about when you’re not forced to deal with it on a day to day basis.

The manner in which this massive censorship programme intrudes upon your consciousness is infuriatingly simple. Any website deemed to be in any way inappropriate or even remotely sensitive, or indeed even simply written in English and as-yet-unvetted, will totally fail to load, producing nothing but a paltry 404 error returned in the standard format of your browser of choice. No outright evidence of intervention, no message of any kind. Simply the impression of a dead link. It is something I regularly come up against, and there is very little you can do about it. Even AOL’s parental controls would inform you that they had been triggered. Even the obscenity gauge running on the computers at college would return a highly entertaining little page detailing the offences for which a site had been cut off. On a side note, I must add that I was always mystified as to what the point of this particular piece of software was, because after deciding that a particular web page was not acceptable viewing on grounds of strong language it would then give a comprehensive and totally uncensored list of the words which had triggered its blocking the page, and the frequency with which they had occurred. But the Great Firewall never acknowledges its own existence, even as it prevents you from accessing things, preferring to hide behind the flimsy and sinister pretence of a technical error.

The list of things blocked by the Firewall is constantly changing. This much is clear from the disappearances and inexplicable returns of pages according to the level of sensitivity of their contents. Perhaps the most blatant and aggravating (to me, certainly) example of this came halfway through March, when the story about the troubles in Tibet broke. In the days prior to the protests, I was happily using guardian.co.uk as my primary source of news. The minute the events in Lhassa began to permeate public consciousness, however, the Guardian suddenly vanished, its URL returning only that bane of the internaute’s existence, the 404. Casting around for alternative sources of news, I found that all of the major UK papers had had their sites blocked. The furthest I could get was the front page of the Telegraph’s site (not my preferred news source, but any port in a storm, and it’s a hell of a lot better than the Mail), but every secondary page – every linked story I clicked on – was 404ing like there was no tomorrow. Where to go for information?

Ultimately I found a couple of answers to this dilemma. The first one was to get the news in a language other than English. Testing a casual theory that I was formulating, I made my way over to the online home of Le Monde, only to find it, even at the height of the paranoia about Western reporting and media perceptions, available as normal. I was thus able to satisfy my curiosity as to what was going on, and why I was receiving some slightly alarmed e-murmurs about trouble brewing. Browsing around, I found that the websites for various major non-anglophone European newspapers continued to be available, despite espousing similar views and reporting the same stories as their zealously-blocked UK counterparts. lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr, elpais.es and welt.de were all perfectly readable. My ideas about the reasons for all this can roughly be divided into two theories which overlap somewhat:
a) The people doing the censoring may not be particularly au fait with European languages other than English
b) The people on whose behalf the internet is being censored (ie. the average Chinese web user) are far more likely to have English as a second language than French, Spanish or German.
The upshot of all of this, however, is that if you’re reasonably comfortable with one of these languages then you can continue to access news and information on the Chinese internet in a time of crisis. However, those of you whose linguistic skills leave something to be desired should not despair just yet. I later found to my interest while tooling around the web that the site of the New Zealand Herald still seemed to be accessible. Why this should be the case I’m not entirely sure, although it must be noted that NZ is a small country, and by no means an international heavy-hitter, so perhaps their national press simply escaped the notice of the censors (although I didn’t monitor availability over time. There’s a small chance that I could have contributed to getting them blocked having highlighted their existence by visiting. I seem to have single-handedly removed Dialectizer from the Chinese internet by using it experimentally as a makeshift proxy to access BBC news).

Since the furore died down, the British newspapers have become available online once more, so I should be able to access the news from now on… as long as it isn’t too important [insert rolled eyes of exasperation]. However, the glitchiness of internet access in the People’s Republic reaches further than mere site-blocking, and operates in stranger, more mysterious, and equally disturbing ways. Facebook, that essential networking tool of everybody and their mother (literally in the cases of a few people I know), is accessible. But the interference of the censors remains evident when using the site, and manifests itself most frustratingly in its refusal to send or post certain messages or wall scribblings. Frequently, when using Facebook whilst in China, I have written replies to people’s messages, comments and other outpourings of words, and then found myself totally unable to send them. Upon clicking to post, the box has timed out or produced an error message. This rejection of comments and messages does not have any recognisable logic to it. All I have really been able to make out is that certain words seem to trigger the wrath of the Firewall. I have edited out phrases while actually in the process of posting comments, while waiting for the page to respond, only to find that without some particular sensitive word my comment will go through instantly. Other times it has been impossible to post anything but the most bland and utterly inconsequential greeting without receiving an error message of Fail. Beyond FB, even the giant of Gmail is not immune from the reach of the censors’ tentacles. I can’t send any email from it: I have to resort to hotmail instead for some unfathomable reason.

And really, it is all very well my complaining about all of this, but for me it is only a temporary frustration. The time will come, quite soon, when I will be able to return to my internet-happy dominion where I can access more or less whatever I want (except the website of TV network Showtime, who for some inexplicable reason have decided to deny access to their website to anyone outside the United States), and the censorship of the Great Firewall will cease to be an immediate problem for me. But, being away in another country and Experiencing Things, one almost feels obliged to learn some kind of terribly sobering life lesson, and if I must be forced to go along with such an awful cliché, let my big thing be free access to information. Not that I was exactly apolitical beforehand (let’s face it, John Stuart Mill is my homeboy), but I imagine that I shall be just a little more vociferous about the issue when I return home. Because it is so terribly worrying that the world’s biggest nation should grow up with, and be constantly subjected to, a huge barrier denying them access to different opinions and new, challenging voices. I think I read somewhere that China has the largest number of internet users on earth. But behind this big fact is the sobering truth that really what this army of Middle Kingdom web surfers are exposed to is an utterly stilted and compromised version of the infinite glut of humanity that is the world’s wider web.