Hey Nanny, one question. Why?

My wife walked in while I was reading the ://URLFAN site I mentioned in my last blog post. After seeing what it was I was looking at, she asked why I was reading that site. I explained to her that I was trying to access a website in order to download a book I want to read.

Early yesterday we were at a bookstore at BLCU, where my wife is taking some classes, and I was looking at a copy of the Canterbury Tales. It was 18RMB, and I almost bought it. Then I thought to myself, “It’s not copyrighted, it’s very old and it’s a classic, I’m positive I can download it as an eBook for free from Gutenberg.org,” so I saved my 18RMB and went home to find it online. It was then that I discovered Gutenberg.org has been blocked.

Almost every time I come across a website that has been banned in China it has a similarly benign story behind why I am trying to access it, and furthermore it usually contains extremely irrelevant-to-China content. I can only imagine that the vast majority of internet users in China have this same experience from time to time.

It just seems bizarre that the Chinese government persists in its banning of so many sites on the internet. Ann Condi’s recent post, “Apathy — Glimpses Inside the Chinese Media” on Danwei is a great read on how pointless China’s internet censorship actually seems given the reality of most Chinese internet users’ browsing habits. She concludes that because most Chinese she knows are so apathetic to internet censorship “one sometimes wonders why the government bothers to censor the Internet at all.” I couldn’t agree with this statement more.

Tags GFW, Censorship

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