Wednesday February 23rd, 2011

Today has been much like the other two days: studying, working out, and reading.

I’ve started reading some of the Stiglitz Report, a book about the international response to the financial crisis. It is a very interesting book, and is allowing me to keep up with the economic debate on current events.

I am also trying to keep up a little on the situation in Egypt and Tunisia. I am not going to comment on the situation itself, but the Chinese response to the crisis has been rather interesting. There is very, very little on the Internet about Egyptian revolution. To access the information, I had to enter “Egypt current news” in Google to get any results about the revolution. I find this interesting because in the States, if you entered simply “Egypt,” I am sure that you would find all manner of news on the topic.

However, most of the information on the situation in Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen is blocked. Intriguingly, I can access nearly all of the information on Wikipedia, and from there, I navigated to the history of the current crisis. Can anyone tell me why the government will allow the existence of Wikipedia in China? You can look at anything on the Wikipedia site, from Tibet to Xinjiang, to any other sensitive topic that Beijing deems as “harmful to the reputation of the Republic.”

As you can see, I spend a lot of time of the Internet – why would one not while the smog outside threatens to kill us? I wonder about why the CCP allows certain things to be public access here, while not allowing some sites that appear to be rather harmless. The primary site that comes to mind when I contemplate this topic is Google. The relationship between the CCP and Google stretches much farther into the past. Around 2-3 years ago, the Chinese government outlawed Google within the Republic because the American-based site accused China of breaching intellectual property laws. Google was challenging the right of the CCP to allow people in China to download music, movies, and books straight off of the Google server. I don’t think that the Chinese government could deny the fact that they are allowing people to effectively steal information off of the Internet, and the US government and Google were both up in arms about the blatant disrespect of property rights in China.

This resulted in a rather awkward standoff between the CCP and Google, which eventually resulted in the CCP allowing citizens to access Google in China but limiting the amount of information that the Google searches could access. For those computer nerds out there, Google prides itself on searching information from every website in existence, and from that list creating the best search options for you, the customer. Thus, Google was not too happy with the arrangement either.

Also, if you type anything that is “sensitive” into Google, your Internet connection will suddenly “time out.” Imagine that. I mention all of this to say that I can’t access Google News, and it makes it very difficult to find news on the web.

On the other hand, if you wish to search any topic on the web, your best bet would be to use Yahoo!. Of course, if you don’t mind only accessing CCP sanctioned documents.

I’ll write soon!

Love,

Jamey