Oh, Big Brother: you won’t believe how many sites are now blocked in China

“On April 20, 1994, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) built the first cable connected to the Internet, realizing email communication with North America and Europe.” [1] The photo below shows the scene in the lab. And that’s when China plugged into the internet.

A few years after turning it on, China’s government started working on ways to restrict this new-fangled web. Realizing that this whole new medium of communication entailed a free flow of information, even though few in the country had access to it yet, work began in 1998 on the Golden Shield Project. It was ready by late 2003. Now it’s known and despised as China’s Great Firewall.

This system of web censorship has grown enormously in scope and strength in the past decade. It now blocks many of the most popular websites in the world. The websites of billion-dollar companies like Google and Facebook, with billions of users in the rest of the world, are dark, shuttered rooms in China, filled with spider webs and echoes. Only a few of China’s more clued up geeks venture inside, using free proxies to access what they’re not supposed to see. Most do so just for fun content – to catch up with the neglected Facebook page they set up before the block, to watch the latest viral video on YouTube. Now that even Gmail is blocked, some are realizing they even need to find a new email service.

All the blocks implemented by the Great Firewall look like a scattergun approach to suppressing free speech, but there’s a method to it. Net Nanny is not as mental as you might think; sometimes there’s a canny logic. For example, Myspace is not blocked, because it’s irrelevant. Many things remain unblocked for now, like Vine, mainly because they’ve not been used to spread material that the Firewall would rather shield. That could change any day. Anything could be blocked at any time. DuckDuckGo is the most recent to get the kibosh.

Block party

To find out how extensive the blocks have become, we’ve used the superb resource that is GreatFire.org. We scoured the Alexa top 1,000 sites in the world and went even deeper into the GreatFire database to produce a list that covers all the major sites and services currently blocked in China. [2]

While you’re browsing through all the big-name sites that have been whacked in China, remember that the real issue with all this web censorship is how it’s keeping people in the dark on a range of important yet contentious issues, happening on the kind of sites that are more in-depth and more involved that what a page on Facebook or G+ could ever be. That’s why thousands of small sites relating to Tibet and other politically sensitive topics have been blocked over the years; same goes for anything that amounts to collective action, even if it relates to victims of injustice. It would be impossible to count them all.

See: China’s mobile internet users now outnumber its PC internet users

That’s been going on since the Great Firewall was first implemented in 2003, and long before authorities decided to augment the blocks by taking down major sites such as Twitter, which happened in 2009.

And don’t forget academic resources, or groups related to free speech. Many of those are blocked too. All the censorship is becoming an increasing burden to educational institutions and businesses alike.

Wait. It gets even worse. Even in the case of overseas sites that are not blocked, a mixture of distance and alleged deliberate ‘throttling’ of foreign websites make them so slow as to be unusable. Before Google got fully blocked, it was throttled for years to make it appear as if Google’s search engine was slow and buggy. Chinese search engines Baidu and Qihoo soared at that time while Google slowly plummeted. Now it’s effectively dead in the country.

Here are the biggest blocks so far (most recently updated December 29: added in Gmail’s IMAP, SMAP, and POP servers):

Social media

Newspapers and media

Search engines

Work and productivity

Online tools

Redux: gagging Google