China Digital Times brings us this rap video by Gao Yuan, featuring cosplay, martial arts, and English subtitles… and the line “Go censor your own motherfucker ass.” Via CDT: Artist Gao Yuan has produced a video based on the song “Nunchaku” by Taiwanese singer Zhou Jielun (Jay Chou), rewriting the lyrics to curse government censorship.
Via Xinhua: The top legislature on Monday began deliberating a draft decision that will strengthen the protection of personal information online by requiring Internet users to identify themselves to service providers.
As China ramps up Internet restrictions, companies like Sina Weibo are demonstrating they’ve clearly gotten the message by passing on the consequences to you, the user. Via Tech in Asia: Users of Sina Weibo that mention things somewhat more controversial than cats or food might find their posts being delayed – by seven whole days. The Twitter-like Sina Weibo... Read more »
Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the UK, went on BBC’s Newsnight yesterday to speak with presenter Gavin Esler (video in link). They discussed several issues — China will double per capita income of the people in 10 years, Diaoyu islands have belonged to to China “since centuries,” “it is up to the Syrian people to decide who... Read more »
TAR Nation is on vacation (don’t worry, not the forced kind), so leave it to the rest of us to call buncombe on Global Times. Its latest un-bylined editorial is about the Internet:
Yesterday, People’s Daily published a front-page column calling for better behavior on the Internet, not sure whether with the window open or closed in its ivory tower. As translated by China Media Project (emphasis theirs): An open China requires a civilized and healthy online world governed by rule of law. Everyone, whether supervising government bodies... Read more »
Those who live in China and use a foreign-run VPN already know this, but China upgraded its firewall not long ago and is throttling access to forbidden sites (such as Facebook, Twitter, and the New York Times) in new, improved, and annoying ways. Here’s the Guardian’s much-linked-to story on the subject: China Unicom, one of the biggest... Read more »
This paragraph is simply THE WORST. It comes from Global Times, of course, in a story headlined, “Foreign-run VPNs illegal in China: govt” (emphasis mine): Residents in China have found logging into their Facebook and Twitter accounts increasingly difficult in recent days, after several popular VPN (virtual private network) companies have alleged that China’s Great Firewall (GFW)... Read more »
I have to admit, the first time I encountered @XHNews, calling itself the “Xinhua News Agency” — description, “A multimedia group, Xinhua delivers the most authoritative China news as well as fast and objective global news” — I thought it was a joke. (First tweet, March 1: “Annual sessions of China’s top legislature and political... Read more »
In the cat-and-mouse game of Internet censorship in China, the mice will always be ahead. As Wall Street Journal reports, some savvy web users are using a rather simple method for viewing restricted content: Most computers, running both Windows and OS X (and smartphones running Android), contain a host file, which is a document with... Read more »
