I have been in North-Eastern city of Shenyang in China for the last more than 3 months, using the available 1mbit/512kbit broadband connection here everyday. It’s about 12$ per month for this ADSL connection, which they set-up for you in a day with a technician to come within an hour and setup your computer if you have trouble (it’s PPPOE).
I have access Google.com perfectly! Though Google images sometimes does not work, and gmail.com often does not work, but I have no probvlem receiving all my gmails using POP account and Mozilla Thunderbird. Wikipedia and Blogspot are blocked. But all blocked sites are simply the chinese ISP’s DNS filtering a few sites! Nothing so bad about it! And easilly circumvened anonymously by using a http-port proxy server located outside China!
BitTorrent works great here. Sometimes the bitrate on single-connection file transfers to users outside China is slow, about 5kb/s, thus I simply have to use multiple connection techniques, like BitTorrent, or like splitting a file up, sending with multiple skype file transfer connections and reassembling the file with WinRar. But that is probably because we are so many people in China using the backbone bandwidth at some certain high peak times, the chinese ISP will probably buy more bandwidth and every connection will be faster, and probably quite soon users will get choices for faster than 1mbit/512kbit internet, at least in this city of Shenyang.
My opinion about Google.cn filtering a few words and sites is simply that the Chinese government want the search results to filter out results, thus not to display Google’s cache of sites which the Government anyways are filtering out on their DNS servers. This is really I think not a big deal, and just a matter of time before the Chinese government will decide to cancel all those meaningless bans.
I understand the chinese government is scared of certain Blogs and of chinese people mobillizing for somekind of Democracy. I am not certain if the chinese Government is evil or not, but I have a feeling that they are not necessarilly very evil, since in this city of 7 million people there are no beggars or people living in the street. Though many chinese people have very bad and booring jobs, like cleaning the streets in the cold, but every city in America also have it’s % of people with crappy jobs. I understand the chinese government needs to secure and implement the right new laws that will permit a good kind of Democracy to emerge. I understand people here don’t want some group of people like the Geroge Bush group to take over control of the government too quickly!! USA is certainly not a good example of good Democracy. China needs to embrace and develop together with Google the best possible and Web 2.0 kind of systems that will permit Democracy to exist and that it will be infllible for evil people like Bush to somehow trick the electoral process and take control on the government only for private interests push for control over Oil and War.
I think those Americans think they have freedom of speech, but it’s useless if when you talk nobody listens to you because a certain group of billionnaires control the media and trick the democratic process every 4 years.
HD (128mb)