Posted on Mar 11, 2007 - 3:17am by John P. in Politics, Site Updates
Just a few days ago I read about yet another bit of unbelievable Internet censorship coming out of China. It seems they have decided to eliminate access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal - effectively shutting down access to 1.8 million blogs!
This got me thinking. Given that I routinely report on Chinese abuses I wondered how many - if any - of my readers were coming from China.
For those of you who are not aware, Web servers collect various generic statistics such as the IP address of visitors. These IPs can be traced back to the country of origin and I can view a report of where visitors are coming from.
As you can see in the attached image I haven’t had a single visitor from China. This simply cannot be a coincidence.
I use the "No Adverts for Friends" plugin by Donncha O Caoimh
Welcome to the club! People need to remember that even though China has made some strides, the nation is still a communist ruled society. As long as they are still accepting of communist rule and until that changes, totalitarian tactics including extreme censorship will be the rule of the day. Information is the enemy there. To see and check other sites banned in China, this is an interesting site. http://greatfirewallofchina.org
i’d say you reached a fair conclusion, considering how things are still done in china. however, i take issue with one facet: you also have no readers in the entire continents of south america or africa and very little asian readership overall. perhaps this has more to do with the facts that your blog is in english and many people in the world don’t have internet access.
Timaree,
Your point is very valid and believe me, I considered it carefully. The hypothesis I formulated went something like this:
So, I guess I might have over-simplified the original post by basically showing the image as “proof”. The real proof was more definitive as reflected in the actual server stats but I didn’t want to bore everyone with the details.
John
fair enough reasoning. thanks for the explanation!
Interesting.
But what about India?
Does this mean Indian government is blocking one man’s blog as well?
No shortage of english speaking people there…
peter