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 aliasinkhorn rated 6 months ago - If an Internet user in China searches for the word persecution, he or she is likely to come up with a link to a blank screen that says page cannot be displayed.
The same is true of searches for Tibetan independence, democracy movements or stranger sounding terms such as oriental red space time --...
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- aliasinkhorn rated 6 months ago
- If an Internet user in China searches for the word persecution, he or she is likely to come up with a link to a blank screen that says page cannot be displayed.
The same is true of searches for Tibetan independence, democracy movements or stranger sounding terms such as oriental red space time -- code for an anti-censorship video made secretly by reporters at China's state TV station.
It's a reflection of the stifling, bizarre and sometimes dangerous world of Internet censorship in China. The communist government in Beijing is intensifying its efforts to control what its citizens can read and discuss online as political tensions rise ahead of this summer's Olympic Games.
Fighting the censors every step of the way is an army of self-described hacktivists such as Bill Xia, a Chinese-born software engineer who lives in North Carolina. Xia and others are engaged in a kind of technological arms race, inventing software and using other tactics to allow ordinary Chinese to beat the Great Firewall of China and access information on sensitive subjects such as Chinese human rights and Tibet, the province where pro-independence sentiment has boiled over in recent months.
Invoking the hit science-fiction movie The Matrix, Xia has compared what he does to giving Chinese Web surfers a red pill that lets them see reality for the first time. He spends long nights struggling to outfox an opponent -- the Chinese government -- that is arguably the world's best at controlling what its people see.
They are very smart, Xia says. We have to move very quickly.
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