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One Man’s Blog Banned in China

John P.

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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!

Banned In ChinaThis 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.

Comments

  1. Hi man, Chinese coming, Nice to meet you.
    This is a reader from Shanghai who overcome the language barrier, though quite reluctantly.
    That I found here was actually a coincidence….
    While googling some data about a Chinese mathematician xiaoyun Wang, I was linked here.
    In my opinion, you haven’t touch something important or political or or crucial about China, so the Great GFW created by our sensitive and sometime self-confidence-lacked government has no reason to ban your blog .
    If you want to get the honor of being banned by our omniscient and omnipotent GFW , in my humble opinion, u’d better cut off those trivial anecdotes and learn more structure about chinese history, culture , society, then tell us something real helpful.
    I’m sorry my English is quite poor and still need more excise. If I made some mistakes in expression, please don’t laugh at me , I’ll be very happy if corrected .
    Long live friendship between Chinese and American:)

    Kashiata

  2. 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

  4. Timaree,

    Your point is very valid and believe me, I considered it carefully. The hypothesis I formulated went something like this:

    • Africa’s Internet infrastructure is so poor that generally speaking they don’t show up on anyone’s server logs. The same is true for places like North Korea where even cell phones are banned, or the Middle East.
    • Although no dots show up in South America on the map my server log files still show visits from there. I just think they aren’t in quite high enough concentrations for Google to point them out.
    • I don’t have a single entry in my log files from China, yet there is a very large population of people connected to the Internet there. Furthermore, China is about to become the world’s largest English speaking country, so there are plenty of people would could overcome the language barrier.

    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

  5. 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.

  6. 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