More about the Internet in China

As you guys already know, I have dedicated a lot of my career to studying and teaching about the Internet. And this voyage is no different. I resolved to visiting as many Internet Cafe's as possible and reporting back on my impressions. So here we go.....

My first Internet café visit was in Hong Kong, in a room adjacent to a large and modern gaming area in a shopping strip floor full with computer stores. I had little trouble connecting and working on my blog. The young man at the reception desk knew English and ventured even a smile while greeting me. I felt at home despite of the fact that somewhere in the room a guy was blasting Britney Spear’s music with no consideration for other while watching a music video online.

The second Internet café I visited was in Shanghai right across the street from where we docked the ship. It was up 4 flights of dark unlit stairs behind an entry way covered with a blanket and some plastic sheets. It had more than 200 computers but was mostly empty. The reception we got from the young girl sitting at the front desk seemed very cold and unpleasant but it could have been because she did not speak English. She and a guy smoking a cigarette standing next to her at first refused to show me how to plug in my flash drive. After insisting that they do (with hand gestures), the guy crawled under the cubicle with my designated computer and plugged it in. However, from that point on, I was not able to use the content on the flash drive to upload it on the Internet (into email or my blog). Every time I managed to get on the Internet, my connection timed out after a few seconds. I was cold (it was freezing with no heat in the building) and agitated and somehow felt being controlled. I lasted 30 minutes before I gave up and left. On my way out, the guy gave me a strange look. I wondered whether he was the one playing with my access…
My third Internet café was in a business area in Shanghai. On a 3rd floor of a building decorated with large posters of the World of Warcraft videogame, another large and dark room filled with cigarettes smoke awaited. The room was full with young people many of whom had headphones on and were playing video games. When I started inquiring again about using my flash drive, I was directed to a special section in the room that had extensions for plugging in the USB drives. Initially I could not navigate through the Chinese characters online to get to the files on the drive but could not get a single person who spoke little English to help. The one person I approached that seems to know what I was saying, backed off when I pointed to my screen and asked where my files were. Then I started having problems connecting to the Internet and even once I did, I could not reach my blog and had problems uploading my pictures to my gmail account. As I started asking my colleague who came with me to check her blog and found out she could not get into it either, my sense of discomfort grew. And then I noticed the presence of a guy that was not there before sitting right behind us smoking a cigarette and observing us behind out backs… Despite my discomfort I decided to carry on an online chat with my son in New York, which went on without any interruptions. However, when I tried to download a music file he had sent me of his recent jingles, nothing worked despite a seemingly successful download. So off I went (I was once again very cold and agitated)…

Finally, I also had a talk with our young tour guide (a 21 years old recent college graduate who spoke excellent English) about her Internet use. She told me that many of her peers circumvent the Chinese Central Government’s blocking of Internet sites by using proxy servers (I posed the question to the vice-rector of Fudan University about the university’s role in restricting Internet access to students and, after consultation with his other colleagues in the room, he said the only restrictions are those imposed by the Central government). Those servers need to change all the times because the minute they get discovered, they are being closed. So the Chinese Internet users are constantly sending each other phone text messages to update the safe proxy servers list available. She also told me the Facebook and YouTube are very popular right now in China and that she has been spending lots of time on Facebook since she is new to Shanghai and have been able to make good friends that way. Yet she also said “this is very bad. The Internet takes time away from real relationships and I have to make sure I do not use it too much.” She pays 1000 Yuan a year for her ADSL access and says all her friends have Internet access. When I asked her about using the Internet for business, she said there is very little use of it for that purpose. Having told he about my specialty in e-business, she said I ought to come to China to help built that business sector since many Chinese have become very inspired by the success of the Alibaba Internet site and its IPO.

From the New York Time's Article, February 4, 2008
Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend’s blog was blocked.