The Great Firewall of China Issue

We take a look at why the internet company Google is coming under intense criticism for agreeing to censor material deemed objectionable by the Chinese government and how Yahoo and Microsoft comply with China’s censorship orders.

What makes the news from China is usually the bad news: the arrests, the raided churches, the blocked Internet sites, the overzealous security goons. That’s the way journalism works — we cover planes that crash, not those that land.

Opera has sealed the hole its Mini browser tunneled through the Great Firewall of China. With the international version of Opera Mini - the company's Java-based mobile browser - Chinese users had found a way of freeing themselves from local net filters, accessing sites otherwise banned by the government. The browser shuttles all net traffic through compression servers located outside the country, and naturally, those servers lack Chinese filters.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization,” declared Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto

The China-Google scuffle is about two divergent visions of the future, with globalization at one end of the spectrum and stability and nationalism on the other.The case for Globalization is not lost, despite China’s current stance. From the dawn of time, human civilization has been involved in the process of connecting across boundaries seeking goods and services, food, and assimilating culture and religion while doing so.

Social networking websites have made the world a smaller place. There is no group that appreciates this more than expats who have left their loved ones behind, perhaps indefinitely, for foreign climes. But, if you live in mainland China, life has suddenly become a place of the unthinkable – a place where Facebook no longer exists.