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China’s notorious firewall was down temporarily this week, allowing the Chinese to access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites usually blocked by the country’s strict Internet controls.
The cause of the breach is currently unknown, Reuters reports. Internet users say the were able to access sites — without using expensive VPNs, as some do — Monday night and Tuesday. By Wednesday, however, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were again blocked.
During the firewall’s outage, many Chinese flocked to Google+, particularly to U.S. President Barack Obama’s page. They left many comments calling for freedom of expression, such as “the Chinese GOV doesn’t represent the Chinese people.”
“It is important to persistently let the world know about CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party] evil deeds against China and Chinese people,” another commenter wrote. “I think that you also should get organised with a clear plan and with clear task responsibility. Do not forget to communicate with those who are living within China.”
China shuts down access to millions of foreign sites each year. The government believes that uncensored access to social networks would cause societal disruption.
Home-grown social networks, such as Sina Weibo (a microblog Twitter substitute) and Renren (a Facebook-like network) are popular, yet censor content in accordance with government regulations.
How do you think communications can best be facilitated between China and the rest of the online world? Let us know in the comments.
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Interesting to see how people in china searching places where they can be more freedom. Even though China is the largest in terms of its growth… people inside are not happy.
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well.. one thing is clear Chinese value Google+ more than anything else !!!!!!!!!!!
thinking China is so big, how come it’s too controlled by few
Now people are accessing all those things. i beleive they wil be happy but its must to have a good firewall which could allow facebook and twitter
And just in time for Facebook’s new ad formats, too. Chinese users must be so excited!
It seems china wants to research something..otherwise it wouldn’t happen in the growing country like china!
I’m sure Facebook would be pushing to get an extra 1.3bn users who won’t complain about the change to the timeline interface!
Is there an English language front end to Renren?
Nope there isn’t an English interface for Renren….. btw Renren sucks. Facebook is way better. i use both.
In fact http://www.kaixin001.com is much better than Renren it also does not have English but I use Google Chrom to translate the site and make friends there
As a Chinese currently living within the mainland China, I can tell you that actually here people concern more about the surging housing price other than the freedom of speech. Moreover, nearly 90% of Chinese citizens don’t know the existence of GFW. On one hand, Weibo and Renren can well meet demands. On the other hand, as most Chinese treat English just like a stepping-stone to job instead of a communicational tool. Thus we have formed a relatively closed web culture. It’s a deadlock. Hardly can anyone break it down until the day we Chinese can choose what we wanna konw.
I agree, if anything I think Chinese people are excited for YouTube’s funny videos. Facebook means nothing to them when their friends are on Renren & Weibo. I think its all the expats without VPN’s who were excited to check their Facebooks :)
Really? I would think being to finally & freely communicate with people they know in other nations (or relatives) on Facebook would appeal to them.
I agree with you Kee. The housing prices in China are getting outrageous! Also about the average Chinese workers approach to learning English. I’m a foreigner living in Beijing and work at a Social Influence Marketing Agency. All of our employees are exposed to Facebook and Twitter: They MUST be or they can’t help our clients. Many Chiense firms want exposure on these platforms as well as RenRen, Sina, Tencent, etc.
I don’t think they got the news that no one uses Google+.
Wrong, many people infact use Google+, they also happen to use Facebook and other sites aswell. They dont have to choose just one, Google+ infact is growing alot internationally.
you have no sense of humour.
But if they had just 36 hours or so access wouldn’t they use the one that has like 10x as many people?
LOL…………
Its only a matter of time before the Chinese government is forced to change. It could take years, but in order for them to remain a powerhouse in the international community, they will have to change their ways. China should remember that other countries are catching up in their capability to produce consumer products at low prices. The world doesn’t need China to survive, if anything China depends on the world for its economic future.
I’m not sure why the article said “expensive VPNs”. VPNs are cheap and there’s so many different VPNs to choose from in China. I’m currently in Shanghai and the VPN I use costs 100RMB per year. ‘
Thats like USD$1.30 per month.
With VPN, people in China can access Facebook, Youtube, you name it, everything.
You know, the Chinese complains about being blocked. They just gotta take some effort to buy and install the VPN and they can talk to Obama on G+ the whole day for all the want.
So using a VPN is legal in China? If it is (and so cheap) then what’s the point of the GFW?
VPN’s used in order to circumvent the GFW are not allowed. They are illegal. And the “good ones” that don’t get shut down by the government are more expensive. Essentially, there are more costs and knowledge involved in order to access the open Internet in China. So yes, it’s POSSIBLE to get open access to the Internet in China, but it costs more, it’s illegal, and (from a human rights perspective) people shouldn’t have to go through all that trouble in order to have access to information.
How about a free VPN service?
A distributed network of host pc’s offering vpn services to China with a ‘discovery’ mechanism for assigning hosts to clients?
Not sure about the technical aspects, but surely the theory is sound?
how long was it down for?
As a Chinese, I would like to fuck the GFW (the Great Firewall) every day and to tell people how to do so on this post: http://freenuts.com/100-free-tools-for-you-to-access-blocked-sites/ , and I believe more and more people will learn how to access those blocked sites and make the GFW useless one day.
O That’s good :)
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Wow. I feel bad for the Chinese people who took this great opportunity to acquire free knowledge in the internet. It’s like a bird trapped in a cage and can’t use their wings for what they are meant for.
What they need is some sort of P2P twitter-like service that doesn’t necessarily reside on a specific server somewhere that can be censored… so everyone’s tweets would be like bittorrent packets and as long as one person is online it could be distributed – that would help other nations to communicate w/ each other as well – if they had strict censorship laws.
I don’t really know the logistics and how feasible it would be to do something like this, but it would be cool to see what the Chinese people might do if they had freedom of speech – without bounds. It would definitely be awesome to see Chinese become a democracy or republic – I think the age of dictators is coming to an end thanks to social media – just look at arab spring, and even occupy wallstreet – it is going to be harder and harder in the coming years for the voice of the masses to go unheard.
There’s a program called freenet which forms the backbone for more than one p2p service, including a twitter-like service called sone.
The more they demand the freedom of speech the more ways will open up to them to achieve it.
It will certainly will be worth watching the change as it happens.
When you mean there are many comments which says ‘We need freedom!’. Few of them really mean it, lots of them are just celebrating the joy of parade. They don’t know what freedom mean to them. I have many friends using Weibo, they just simply don’t need these kind of freedom. So when the freedom fall, they just simply say some stupid things on Obama’s page. This is what I mean they’re just celebrating.
I’m a developer, Which means, I need to access different kinds of blocked resources via VPN. I understand what my country is doing doing but don’t agree with them, whether this FGW policy is smart. We’re living in China, So we need to get used to it. Or else, get enough money to go to another country instead. Just like bullied student transfer to another school.
Still, I do hope the GFW will be down in the future. I hope there will be a movie call “GFW” and discuss these kind of problem publicly. But today, We have to adapt to it.
Man, when I read stuff like this:
“I used Facebook for the first time yesterday,” Zhang Wenjin, 23, a student at Shanghai’s prestigious Jiao Tong University told Reuters on Tuesday,
I think that even the “joy of parade” mean what they say. I do believe that no one, specially a developer, should state that someone “simply doesn’t need that kind of freedom” because it’s easy to think you don’t need what you don’t know.
On the contrary, it is extremely easy to taste and appreciate someting you think you don’t need.
And stay down!!!!
what was up my friend