Hangzhou (杭州)

Google Censored Censorship Report.

One of the things you realize pretty quickly when you start using the Internet in China is the extend of the government censorship -- not fair, but completely expected given the prior readings on the topic that I happened to have made. Wikipedia doesn't work and the wrong key words will get Google incapacitated for your IP address for a couple minutes.

Following the news that Google would start obliging the authorities in order to be able to deploy their server farms in mainland China so that they can feed their new Chinese portal, CNN International is running a segment on `What will trigger censorship' that I happened to catch last night.

Nor not.

Flipping through channels, vaguely brain dead following my over consumption of Schezuan Peppercorn during an early Spring Festival celebratory lunch at Grand Ma's Kitchen, I happened to get in the middle of that presentation. I caught it just when anchor Myke Chinoy (CNN's senior Asia correspondent) still looking at the camera, with a computer whose full screen web browser displayed Google's Chinese home page as a backdrop, goes: "This is how it works" (meaning, here's what happen when the Great Firewall of China kicks in and decides to censor your access to the net) and then... nothing. The screen went pitch black for 30 seconds or so, only to resume when the segment made way for the commercials.

That was terribly depressing.