大象传媒

Thanks for the response Rory, some really good insights.

I think that the key factor in all of this is that Google is chomping away at baidu's lead in the search engine market and pornography has nothing to do with it.

The Chinese governments biggest control over the internet is that it pushes Chinese owned sites ahead of their international competitors. Instead of ebay they have taobao, instead of google they have baidu, instead of facebook they have xiaonei, the list goes on. This means that Chinese people are putting their information on to Chinese owned servers instead of foreign owned ones.

The problem is that these Chinese owned sites are awful, and eventually people are going to start going to the western versions, which means the control element is lost.

With Google already having a 30% slice in the search engine market, it will be interesting to see whether the government decide to keep trying to subdue google and potentially upset a lot of people.

As a citizens of PRC,I have to say parts of the conversation that are not true affair .Eg:"Chinese Internet users are even prevented from searching for the names of their leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiaobao."

Now,China Time:19:30

I try to type "Hujintao"in chinese ,3,560,000 results are returned,if in PinYin(chinese spelling) hujintao(not capital letter,no space among them,just indicates it is the casual typing),1,940,000 results are available,another way is typing JinTao Hu would be get 2,610,000 results.

Also, I try the another leader name Wen JiaBao, both could be serached by Goolge China,which not were prevented like the Mr.Quentin Sommerville said.

Acoording to"I find surfing okay here, although it drives me nuts when my iPhone automatically takes me to Google's Chinese site, rather than the international site - not much use for a journalist in China.",there has a tip about the use of Google,He can change the settings default from Chinese in English ,then when he type www.google.com,he is able to access to his favourable google.com,international site.

Honestly, the test of changing the settings in my PC not in my mobile phone,which may have little difference about the settings change.But if most of Chinese enable to view the google.com everyday, it not have to be special for the journalist in China.

Like a British using Google,the searching engieen is defualt as google.uk,UK info priority.Similar process in China

No comments about other parts now.Just wish to see 大象传媒 News did not pass the incorrect information to the Public.

As one of the International and High Reputation Media, we look forward to the true and fair opinion.

Oh come on, xiaoshanzi. Your comments, while perhaps helpful in a technical manner for "browser settings" completely ignore the issue at hand. Why does the government feel the need to block people's access to information? Why does the government regularly block sites in the first place? Because they're threatened by the free flow of information? Why has youtube been blocked for months now, and in the course of my work, (since I don't read Chinese very well so baidu is of no use to me), I find google shut down as well, and can't access information I need to do that work to assist my Chinese colleagues?

There is no excuse, other than willful abuse of people's right to free information. And please don't try to spin it as protecting youth from porn. That's just a ridiculous argument. Under whatever guise, whether to cripple a competitor, or to keep from being embarrassed by events in the public eye, blocking access to information is simply wrong.

What about up to date financial and stock information? Financial information is closely linked to international politics. Do you have to find back-doors to that? Or is stock only traded by government approved institutions?

On a related note: Everyone should boycott Lenovo computers. The company is partly owned by the Chinese government. So you can trust a Lenovo as much as you trust the Chinese government...

Well, Mr Sommerville is pretty much right, although as Chinese I do not think it has been exaggerated about the web controls in China. In fact, the controls are more sophisticated and constantly changing.

During the Beijing Olympics there was a short period of freedom in accessing the Internet, since then the English 大象传媒 News website has been selectively censored, more likely on videos and pictures, depending on the dates and events and the unexplained. Before the games it was blocked entirely, just as the present fate of the 大象传媒 Chinese.

Skype (the English one not the Chinese Tom-Skype), was shortly inaccessible on 21st June 2009, until the Shishou Protest ended - a protest of thousands which took place in central China. There is also something funny about downloading the official English Skype software - it keeps jumping to the download page of Tom-Skype.

What's more, Youtube, Blogspot are among the blocked; blogs are heavily censored, as well as other social networking sites (sometimes no access on sensitive dates); And there are always a legion of hired professional online propagandists busy around here and there. Ai Weiwei the Chinese artist whose blogs were forcibly shut before the Tiananmen Aniversary, is calling for a boycott in China against the release of the Green Dam software by not using the net for a day on the first of July.

As for searching the leaders or their relatives or anything else alike, the censorship to keywords can be altered all the time so that what is reported as being blocked can become dated later. For instance, months ago, typing their names in a Google.com or Google.co.uk search engine led to a page can not be displayed as I once pointed out in my previous comment here back in February. Now, this particular blockage seems no longer valid, which might give you the false image of an inaccurate report. But If you try the same search for the name of the Central Propaganda Ministry (Zhong Xuan Bu), in Chinese, then you still get the identical result, which is the same old no-display page. So the censorship is always there, we know very little about it, you can sense it but it is hard to make sense of it.

Exrugger,

I think your comment completely ignores the fact that xiaoshanzi was just trying to clarify or point out inaccuracies or broad generalizations in the article -- he wasn't trying to refute the entire post, and you can tell that because he limits his comments to only "parts" as being not true.

Instead of trying to completely discredit him because you think he's avoiding "bigger issues at hand" we should avoid discouraging people from stepping up to point out inaccuracies in articles on major news sites -- if we move along with the wrong facts we'll wind up making the wrong assumptions and decisions simply because people didn't really understand what was going on. (There are plenty of cases of this in every country, why not try to improve?)


For the record:
- The author mentioning Hu Jintao was unsearchable seemed completely laughable to me, so I tried it as well and you can too ( in Chinese, you can search "Hu Jintao" yourself in English on the google.cn site). In fact _IF_ I were trying to control conversations related to my country's leader, I probably wouldn't completely ban all searches on him/her -- that would be too obvious -- I'd ban only searches that turned up negative discussion. The author's implication that Chinese internet users are "prohibited from searching for Hu Jintao" just tries to exaggerate the situation with no positive effect on understanding the situation. I tend to think Quentin generally wanted to give well-rounded advice, but he definitely messed up in that statement or was butchered in his quote. At least if I were reporting on something as absurd as that, I'd test it out (30 seconds) before trying to convince other people to believe it.

- I too suffer from the google.com -> google.cn problem on my iphone -- any many other similar redirection problems from other sites. However, I've found many problems stem from the flawed assumption that if you are in Country X you want content/interfaces in Country X. Luckily many sites now provide manual options to this automatic behavior (if you can read it), however, you still may encounter huge problems using subsets of a site like forms or mobile versions. In fact, I stopped using Google's iPhone app because it would always direct me to the Chinese version based on my ip address or something. Switching to saved bookmarks in Safari helped this however. (And yes, I've long ago set my preferred language to English)

I am just curious about how much you truely know about china? I dont want to reiterate other points here anymore, 'cause xiaoshanzi and houzi-bj already pictured them very clearly. I just want to know what's your attitude towards china and what's your intention to structure an article like this? It looks like you get all your points from your "tech-savvy" guy who doesnt even know how to set default page and language pereference on his iphone. Alright, I am wrong, he does know how to, please tell me is there anything wrong for chinese people to set default google page to search chinese instead of english or international? It's obvious you are just trying to leveraging all the arguments you can possibly grab to prove things by which you think people would be convinced. Funnest thing is, I dont really see too many "insights" which are highly appreciated by ringsting-iom, from both you and your colleague, just stuff either has been reported for long time or meticulously set up by your western media network. Next time when you post something, could you please at least spend a little bit more time on what you are trying to make people believe, OK?

Another interesting thing is the comments from ringsting-iom, she or he can derive so much irrelevant stuff from nowhere, impressively imaginative. What you saying basically is chinese people should shut down anything home made, give way to your services and products, use whatever you guys use, put everthing on your server, and totally trust you mighty westerners, thanks for your hospitality, we will consider if your governments nod and I guess this type of thoughts well explains why US is able to impose its sovereignty such as military facilities to most countries in the world except few, thanks again for your hospitality.

Anyway, whatever you like to say is not a single issue, what else can you do? Someone learns, but there is always someone who doesnt know what's going on util being taught

tried to read all of the comment in here, just want to say this news is true, but half true, not because he is not a professional reporter or he is trying to say something it is not true, not as a citizen in every nationally, we will never know the true.

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