The Great Firewall of China

Of all the things that are annoying about China number one by a long way is the so called Great Firewall of China. Actually called the Golden Shield Project, but come on who's going to call it anything but the Great Firewall in this country, it was started in 1998 as a response to a growing Democracy movement. Costing literally billions of dollars and effecting the very architecture of the internet in China the project is basically without compare in terms of internet blocking and monitoring. To make such a large monitoring and filtering system possible took designing the internet architecture so that most of the data runs through central points so that it can be more easily monitored. This combined with the actual monitoring is what makes the internet dramatically slower than in other countries. This becomes annoying in several ways. First, besides websites which you could guess would be blocked, things about Tibet etc, there are quite a few seemingly random things blocked. Sights like Youtube which may have some content they don't like, though the Communist Party never actually said what its problem with Youtube is. Even really random websites, like things referring to video games get somehow caught in the dragnet of the Great Firewall. Google image search is also heavily blocked for reasons passing understanding. It took me a while to find an unblocked picture of the actual Great Wall, and if you look for pictures for too long in assumes you are looking for porn or something and shuts off your access to Google for a while.

Even with all this money spent the blocking isn't really that effective Wikipedia website on the Great Firewall lists six different types of ways to get around it. The idea seems to be that they just want to keep most people from getting around it, though it seems that as the country becomes more technologically savvy that this would be harder and harder to maintain. It's worse for me also because the school runs a pretty bad network on top of this so that not only is all the internet in China slow but at the school here it's especially slow. Even using a pretty low bandwidth program like Skype can be almost impossible sometimes. The Great Firewall is just such a good example of the governments paranoia and attempt to be omnipresent. Even in other despotic countries the government doesn't usually try to be as everywhere as the Chinese one does. You really get the sense that the government here is terrified of its own people. It reminds me so heavily of 1984, a book I've seen for sale in China, where the TV's watch people. In China you don't just view the internet, the internet views you.