Some years ago Wikipedia was still on line here and I found there some interesting information, such as the development of the Beijing subways. Not anymore. Seems some bad people posted reactionary stuff on that site so we are being shielded from harm by the Chinese Great Internet Firewall. Thanks to US technology. Very sophisticated technology, the usual proxies won’t work anymore.
The Wall makes our daily Internet life a misery. Working for the Beijing government I often need to surf the net for information – a skill most (local) Chinese are not so good at, for some strange reasons. They manage quite well to surf on Chinese sites but seem lost when digging for useful information internationally.
Several overseas companies have their websites blocked, for reasons that are not clear at all – like high-tech companies, recruitment agencies and others. How I know? Well, we do have some complicated ways to reach the sites, like surfing when abroad.
The worst is: the filtering officially does not exist and certainly NOBODY is in charge. So, no way to complain or ask for review of the censorship.
Internet speeds here can be quite fast – as long as you remain within the Chinese island of the Web. Once you need to make downloads, have some tea, go for a walk. Download speeds can be anything, on a bad day 5KB/sec, a good day 50 KB/sec and if you a real lucky 80 kb/s and more – all on ADSL.
I have been running exhaustive tests to pinpoint the bottlenecks. As far as I see, the major ones are:
– the traffic to the USA goes through too few international Internet gateways;
– the bandwidth in the submarine cable systems is too small;
– the filtering system adds to a considerable slowdown of the signal;
– the transmission (heavily concentrated) lands into a congested US network where technical breakdowns regularly occur;
– China does not have good enough contracts with US operators to use their networks.
China Netcom has been quite understanding at times, they invited me for meetings to see what could be done. They promised the bandwidth will increase – but as long as there is no new major China-USA submarine cable plus better operator agreements, hope is rather limited…
Just recently, after several days of tests, I had to admit myself the filter does indeed slow down traffic and I finally solved the mystery of e-mails that could not be downloaded from a US server to a mail program. I tried all mail programs – normally I use good old Netscape (still GREAT): (Mac) Mail – Entourage – Thunderbird. PC and MAC, whatever operating system: all suffer the same fate: during the download of certain messages the program gives up, blocks and frequently the server mysteriously becomes unavailable from all computers: that is the typical feature of the filter when you handle “unauthorized” messages. After some time, the server is back on line again.
(Nope, I don’t use Outlook!)
It looks like a software or settings issue of the filter – the e-mails are nothing special… the usual victims are the mails from Amcham, the Canada Business Council and others. Seems the trigger is in the first lines of the message: there should be no “funny” images, e.g. linked to a website or with animation, something like that.
The suffering merits no attention from any of the chambers of commerce here. They all lack the guts to bring up the issue, with a variety of lame excuses: “too technical”, “taboo”, too busy, not our concern. Those so-called “IT gurus” I meet here all have their expert theories, mostly they have no clue or pretend not to understand. So most bury their head in the sand, and as we have lots of it in Beijing, that’s easy.
The big companies here have money to pay for expensive IT systems with dedicated lines, special servers/routers and don’t care about us small companies who can just afford ADSL. Happy to learn big Shell also suffers from the same problems. I also know a German bank that is struggling to get their mail – from Germany directly, not from a US server.
The time I lose with all that crap is unbelievable. While it is said the Chinese have a force of 50,000 to check the Net for “bad stuff” (I wonder who came up with that information) I am flooded with SPAM every day, mostly on the local ISP e-mail account. Total of about 150/day on the average. While I do have SPAM filters I still check all mails – the SPAM filters are not reliable anyway. Once again, China could really do something about SPAM but it is not a priority as it seems.
What is considered “bad” by the Internet Wall? Well… sex is OK, so are scams. Certain “evil sects” are bad, as we all know. The Wall still does not a good job though – we are still regularly harassed by those guys, by (taped) calls and e-mails.