Exactly one year ago, on Christmas Day, I published this post about Liu’s Charter. I was critical with the initiative for many reasons: it contained contradictions, it was reactive rather than active, and it was not a Charter to unite all the Chinese. But most importantly, the way the document was drafted ensured that it had not a chance to fly.

The initiative was practically born dead, Charter was never a big subject in China even in early 09, it was the crisis and the stimulus that we watched at the time. The party had won the game from day one, so what point in bullying Liu now, one year later? Clearly, just to set an example to ensure that the rest of the signers will shut up, and to avoid new initiatives in the coming years. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey”, the Chinese tradition says. And that is NOT justice, but a disgusting mafia trick.

Even if you don’t believe in democracy for China—even if you think (like I do) that the hypocritical governments of the West have no lessons to give here—even if the Charter was probably not the best way to attain the noble principles it professed. Even so, any decent person can see that a document like this should never be a reason for a man to be deprived of his freedom.

The party knows this, and it is again censoring and lying on the internet to hide its dirty deed from the people of China.

Now the story has been picked up by the CNN and it is making some noise. If we are lucky and it goes far enough, maybe even Obama will give us a memorable line. But it will not change anything, because all this is part of the deal with China. And the sentence is nothing more or less than what could be expected of the Chinese government today.

Liu knew this well, and he decided to go on in spite of it. That is because he is an idealist and a hero. He will be remembered.

More on this case here. Also, from my own blog: here, here and here.

These are the principles that 303 brave men published in China in 2008:

Freedom. Freedom is at the core of universal human values. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom in where to live, and the freedoms to strike, to demonstrate, and to protest, among others, are the forms that freedom takes. Without freedom, China will always remain far from civilized ideals.

Human rights. Human rights are not bestowed by a state. Every person is born with inherent rights to dignity and freedom. The government exists for the protection of the human rights of its citizens. The exercise of state power must be authorized by the people. The succession of political disasters in China’s recent history is a direct consequence of the ruling regime’s disregard for human rights.

Equality. The integrity, dignity, and freedom of every person—regardless of social station, occupation, sex, economic condition, ethnicity, skin color, religion, or political belief—are the same as those of any other. Principles of equality before the law and equality of social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights must be upheld.

Republicanism. Republicanism, which holds that power should be balanced among different branches of government and competing interests should be served, resembles the traditional Chinese political ideal of “fairness in all under heaven.” It allows different interest groups and social assemblies, and people with a variety of cultures and beliefs, to exercise democratic self-government and to deliberate in order to reach peaceful resolution of public questions on a basis of equal access to government and free and fair competition.

Democracy. The most fundamental principles of democracy are that the people are sovereign and the people select their government. Democracy has these characteristics: (1) Political power begins with the people and the legitimacy of a regime derives from the people. (2) Political power is exercised through choices that the people make. (3) The holders of major official posts in government at all levels are determined through periodic competitive elections. (4) While honoring the will of the majority, the fundamental dignity, freedom, and human rights of minorities are protected. In short, democracy is a modern means for achieving government truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Constitutional rule. Constitutional rule is rule through a legal system and legal regulations to implement principles that are spelled out in a constitution. It means protecting the freedom and the rights of citizens, limiting and defining the scope of legitimate government power, and providing the administrative apparatus necessary to serve these ends.

…despite his youthful bravado, Han, who has published 14 books and anthologies, generally stays away from sensitive issues such as democracy and human rights. His calculated rebelliousness, says Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, exemplifies the unspoken compact his generation has forged with the ruling Communist Party: Leave us alone to have fun and we won’t challenge your right to run the country. "He is known for being a sharp critic of the government and the Establishment but he isn’t really," says Liu. Instead, she says, Han is a willing participant in a process that channels the disaffected energy of youth into consumerism. "The language in his novels and the narrative strategies are very easy to read," says Liu. "Basically it’s all the same book."

Before judging the literary value of the writer, Mrs. Liu makes a moral judgment of his rebelliousness: It is not intense enough to her taste, the issues he deals with are not sensitive enough. I think I’m not too far from the truth if I say that this summarizes the opinion of  a large part of the academic community, and by extension of mainstream Western opinion. You may have noted that Ms. Liu is an expert in literature, not in politics. But when it comes to Chinese politics, we ALL know better than them.

Hecaitou’s blog also posted the interview and we can see some Chinese discuss it among themselves. Allowing for the odd troll, it is a fairly balanced discussion, as expected from an intelligent Chinese forum when they don’t feel observed by Western eyes. Perhaps the 2 most significant comments, that give an idea of the atmosphere, are:

- Compared to those who were criminalized for speaking, Han Han has no courage. He only teases, doesn’t dare to speak about the system.

- You mean, he needs to be a martyr? To fight for your rights, even if it is just a bit, to obtain awareness of citizen dignity, all these are matters that require someone to capture them. To be able to speak from within and disintegrate this system, that is the real master.

A large part of the misunderstandings between East and West come from the unreasonable expectations we have of each other. In particular, Western opinion expects of Chinese public figures to fight heroically and even suicidally against their own government. The Chinese political system is so evil, the logic goes, that any public person worthy of our attention should be dedicated to fighting it.

Now, I am the first who thinks China needs political change and respect of human rights, and I greatly admire the courage of some dissidents. But real heroes should be voluntary, like Mother Theresa, and no amount of public pressure can ever create one. Even less foreign public pressure.

In case I have some naïf reader, it is just as well to inform you here that Western policies are as arbitrary and cruel in the international scene as the CCP’s are accused of being in China. And both are equally full of good intentions. Why don’t we apply the same standards with our own public figures?  Do we require of our writers to fight the system? Have they signed a compact to drive us into a consumerist slumber instead of protesting against injustice in the World?

We don’t do that. We act just like the Chinese, satisfying ourselves with he thought that “The World is unfair, but with a bit of patience and faith in the system, it will eventually become a better place”. Substitute “The World” with “China” and you have the mainstream Chinese thought.

“Hypocrisy”, I was going to write. But I don’t think it’s even that. It is simple closed-mindedness,  the inability to see things from the other side.

These last weeks I have encountered what has to be the weirdest form of political activism ever tried in China.  It has happened twice, each time on a Sunday afternoon. It comes in the form of a phone call from an inexistent number. A very professional recording, with the same neutral feminine voice of all China mobile announcements.

First it gives some news about China, the kind you wouldn’t see on Xinhua. Both times I was walking on noisy streets and couldn’t get all of it, but  I did understand well the following item, which gives you a general idea:  ”A rock has been found in the province of Guizhou that bears some ancient natural marks ressembling the characters “gongchandangwan” (the CPC is finished???)”

The funniest  part is the end of the recording, where the voice gives you the typical voice menu that goes exactly like this (sorry for the pinyin, the characters would get me blocked again).

• Nin xiang tuichu gongchangdang qing an yi.
• Nin xiang tuichu gongqingtuan qing an er.
• Nin xiang tuichu xianfengdui, qing an san.

Which is standard menunese for these 3 options:  quit the CPC (press 1), quit the Communist Youth league (press 2), quit the Young pioneers (press 3).

It is very strange that I should receive such communications, as I am obviously not part of any of the 3 groups. The only explanation is, like usual, that I am too liberal with the use of my name card and I must have handed it to some friend in the resistance (unknown to me). Otherwise I can’t imagine how they got my number, which is not related  in any way to this blog.

In any case,  I must admit I was too nervous to press any of the 3 options, as images of a modern  “hundred flowers” movement flashed through my mind. Later I have been asking around to my Chinese friends, and at least one of them confirmed she got similar calls to her landline in Shanghai,  causing some minor  panic scenes with her post-CR parents. We are still wondering what happens if you choose option 1, I don’t know of anyone who tried.

Anyone out there has experienced this? Have you tested the options? Is this, as I suspect,  from the FLG?

In any case, I doubt very much these modern forms of dissent can be really effective. China Mobile are notoriouly bad at solving your problems on the telephone, and this 60 years old problem seems too large even for them to tackle. This does confirm, however, that China Mob has much less control over the content of sms/voice messages than I imagined. This campaign has been going on for at least 3 weeks, and I am sure the company wouldn’t approve.

Other news

I might go missing for a few days this week because I am headed to the Edinburgh festival with my old Shanghai friend Caz. If anyone is going to be around let me know. I will be back end of the month with more interesting stories.

Prevention – Try to stay out of trouble

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

• Be careful with what you publish. >>>
• Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. >>>
• Choose where you want to be hosted. >>>
• Choose a good, flexible hosting service. >>>
• Host your blog/site on a subdomain. >>>

Action – When trouble is at your door

Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

• Make sure it is really the GFW. >>>
• Check if there is an IP block. >>>
• Find out if the target is really you. >>>
• Check if there is an URL block. >>>
• Move to a new IP address. >>>
• Change your URL and Redirect. >>>
• Check that you don’t have links. >>>
• Try to eliminate the keywords. >>>
• Take it easy, and send feedback. >>>

Notes and Disclaimers

• Don’t forget to read the party of the first part >>>

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PREVENTION

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

1. Be careful with what you publish. Sites in English have more leeway than Chinese to publish political content, but the more popular your posts get the tighter the line will be. Any kind of political activism can get you blocked, in particular subjects that are seen as potential menace to the one-party system. You can easily be misunderstood if you mention those subjects, even if your intention was different. Apart from politics, the other big subject that can get you blocked is porn.

2.Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. OK, if you need to write about these subjects, then try to avoid writing GFW keywords. To test which words are GFW keywords, run a search on Wikipedia in China, and see if it resets the connection. There are many ways to avoid keywords, such as periphrasis, or use of similar characters (omicron “ο” for “o”, etc.).

The problem is nobody will find your words on Google if you use this, so up to you to see how much you want to trade safety for search engine hits. Bear in mind that keywords won’t get you blocked automatically, and if your site is small enough you can relax and write as many as you want. The risk is some day a big website may link to you, then your keywords will attract the attention of GFW and your trouble starts.

3- Choose a good location for your host. If you are legit business with a business license you can apply for a permit and host your website in China. The permit is easy to get, as long as you don’t do politics or journalism. This solution will make your site faster for users in the mainland, and it will avoid all sorts of trouble with the Great Firewall.

If you are planning to write some controversial content, or if a large part of your readers will be outside the mainland, then it is better to host out of China, otherwise you risk to get your whole site closed down and your data lost. A good location in the middle is Hong Kong. It is well connected internationally and close to one of the nodes entering the mainland. Therefore it should be quick on both sides, plus many Hong Kong hosts are reportedly understanding with the GFW problems and they will help you to get rid of an IP block.

4- Choose a good, flexible host. Regardless of where you are hosted, the most important is that you choose a hosting company that will give you flexibility and will try to help you if anything happens. In particular you should check if there is an affordable option to change your IP. In my case it was 30$/year, I heard from other webmasters they paid double. The essential is to check that your host will give you this options, because not all hosts offer it.

5- Host your website/blog on a subdomain. I learnt this trick in my recent experience. When you get an URL string block, it will not necessarily affect the whole domain, but only the particular subdomain where your site lives.

If you host your site on a subdirectory, such as www.domain.com/blog/, this will allow you to deal with a URL string block very easily, just by moving to, for example, www.domain.com/myblog/. This way you can save the money and the trouble to register a new domain, and you can continue to use that domain that your users already identify with you.

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ACTION
Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

1. Make sure you are actually blocked by the GFW. The first obvious step is to check that you are really blocked by the GFW, and not by some other problem. You should get in contact with some friend who is outside the mainland and a friend inside the mainland. If it is a GFW block, the outside friend should see no difference at all, whereas the inside one should get a Reset Connection error or sometimes a Server Time Out error when he tries to open your site. There are also online tools available to do the test, but  I haven’t tried their accuracy.

2- Check if there is an IP block. The first thing to do in this case is to check if you have an IP block. It is very simple, from China type your site’s IP in the address bar of your browser after the “http://” and if it doesn’t work  then it is an IP block. IP blocks are the most common GFWs blocks so this test should normally confirm step 1. NOTE: If you don’t know what is your site’s IP there are many Firefox free add-ons, and other web based services that will give you this information.

3- Find out if the target is you, or some site living on your server. Very often when you are down to point 3 what is actually happening is that you are collateral damage of the GFW. They are not targeting you, but just somebody else’s site which lives in the same IP or the same subnet (group of IPs). It is not easy to check this, but there are 2 simple techniques that can give you a clue. One is to use a reverse IP service, such as this one, where you can see more or less how many sites are sharing IP with you, and you can get a list of these sites. If you are hosted in the same address as FLG.com (ie. an anti-CCP organization) then you know it was not you.

4- Check if there is an URL block. In China, go to Wikipedia search box (or some other search bar on a site hosted out of China ) and type the strings you want to test. First try domain.com, and then domain.com/blog. If you are lucky only the second one will reset your connection, which means that your domain root URL is still unblocked and you can easily switch to a new subdirectory as explained above.   NOTE: URL blocks typically give RCs. When you do RC tests you must wait for at least a minute after getting a Reset Connection, otherwise you will RC again no matter what you type in (the connection is still not re-established)

5- Change your IP address. OK, so you have done all the checks. It is time for action. Supposing you followed the prevention steps in the first place, you have a cool, understanding host that is not pissed off each time you get his whole subnets blocked in China, and who is willing to swap IPs for a moderate price. Get in contact with him or select a new IP directly from your admin panels functions (if available) from the site.

6- Change your URL and Redirect. This part can be very easy or very difficult, depending largely on how well organized is your website. In any case, the process is not without pain, and you will lose many incoming links. Why? Because even if you have a Redirect on your old URL, anybody in China clicking external links to your old site will get an error, as the connection resets before your server has the time to redirect to the new URL.

If your blog is powered by a good system like WordPress, and if you have been consistent with the use of permalinks over the years, it should be very easy for you to move to the new directory in your same domain. Just follow the steps given in your blog engine and you will be done on a few minutes. If you need to move to a new domain because the whole domain URL is blocked, then it will take a bit longer, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.

7- Check you don’t have remaining requests to your old URL. Many of the blog’s elements, such as pictures, are probably still linked to a URL in your old subdirectory, and therefore when the page loads they instruct the users computer to connect to that subdirectory in order to display the picture. If you have been paying attention you know what will happen in this case: the fretful RC. Don’t panic, run a search in the whole blog (not the search for users on the website, the admin tool in your blog admin panel, you might need to install it as a plug-in. In wordpress it is called Regex Search) and replace all instances of the blocked URL with the new URL.

At this point, you might still see that the blog continues to trip RC. In this case it might be some JavaScript or other active content in your site that is sending requests to the old URL. Use a traffic viewing tool like the free Firefox add-on Tamper Data which will easily show you all the requests sent while loading your site. Type the blocked string in the search bar and you should see the old URL coming up at some point, and the software will tell you which application is the culprit. There is a bit of detective work to do in this case, as it is not always obvious which widget or active element made the call.

8- Try to eliminate all keywords. If you have followed the instructions up to now your site should be open again in China. What I recommend you to do is to run a search for keywords in your blog and try to eliminate/disguise some of them. Especially look at the posts that were linked by big websites and they received a lot of hits in China. NOTE: you don’t need to eliminate outgoing links, a link to a forbidden site does not usually get you blocked, otherwise every major website in China would be down.

9- Take it easy, and tell me about it. Go back to step 1 “prevention” above and try to get smarter so next time you don’t have to go again through the whole process. Or else remain blocked and take it as a honour, make yourself a T-shirt saying “I was blocked by da GFW”, after all not every site is worth the effort of blocking. You must have had at least some relevance in the eyes of the GFW for it to censor you. In any case, if you get GFW’ed and follow these steps, give me your feedback in comments below so we can improve the method.

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NOTES AND DISCLAIMERS

• There is no such a thing as censorship in China, the GFW is due to a bug in the Chinese internet that defies all scientific explanation.
• These instructions are empirical knowledge, I have no internal information on the GFW, and the basis for these instructions is my own experience and that of a few other bloggers shared with me by email. I am not giving credit to anyone here to avoid getting them in trouble again, but guys let me know if you want to be linked.
• It cannot be excluded that the GFW reads these instructions and changes its blocking devices. Also the GFW has a random nature and not all the steps above will work in al the situations.
• These instructions are best used by websites of a small to medium size who are blocked more or less automatically by the GFW. I you are big, especially if you have content in Chinese, then chances are you are followed by human censors. The IP/URL swap will not fool them very long, and they can take you down again easily if that’s what they want.
• If you are hosted within mainland China, GFW instructions do not not apply to you, instead you get what is usually known as the Net Nanny. See this post if you want to understand the difference.
• As far as I know there is nothing illegal in writing instructions for webmasters to deal with an internet bug. However, if this text is somehow illegal or inharmonious, I would be grateful to the concerned department if they can inform me so I can correct it before they take more drastic measures.

Just to make sure we don’t forget anything, I will go first over the most obvious points:

1- If you are any kind of commercial undertaking, or if you depend on your site for a living, please pay attention to what you publish. Sites in English have quite some leeway to publish political content, but the bigger you get the tighter the line will be, and any kind of political activism can get you down.

2- The worst position is when you are big enough to attract the censors attention, but small enough to be insignificant in the general scheme of the internet. Say the BBC gets blocked: this makes a lot of noise, and eventually the Chinese government feels the pressure to reopen it. Inversely, if you stay small enough, you will never be blocked regardless of what you write. When you are in the middle, like these sites, the risk is biggest.

3- Finally, if you are already blocked, you can try your luck at 9 Dongdajie, Qianmen, Beijing, as a commentator suggested (this is the address of the Beijing Public Security Bureau) or any official body of your choice. I have no experience with this, and I am very skeptical about the results, but it is not impossible that the legal system works once in a while. We have seen stranger things in China.

Getting through the block

Once you have gone through the points above and decided that none applies to you, here are the typical solutions for users to get through the Wall. There are many of them, so I will just list the most well known, such as: lists of free web proxies, ad-supported or fee-based VPNs, networks like Tor or activist software like Freegаte*.

I will not go over each of these because you can find lots of information on the internet already, but I have tried a few of them and they all more or less do the trick: you can open in China sites that have been blocked by the GFW. These solutions are well known to the Chinese netizens users, as you can see in this Chinese blog which has even more options, such as giving a SSH number and code to your users.

So, you might think, what’s the big deal with the Great FWall? It is full of wholes big enough for a whole horde of Mongols, like it’s always been.

You are right, and yet, the GFW is a powerful system. For anyone who had a website blocked, it is very easy to see the impact on the stats of incoming hits from China. Depending on your size and content, it can be down to a 25%, and if you remain blocked for some time, chances are most readers will not find their way back to you. My guess: a combination of laziness, hi-tech aversion, and the excess of info flowing on the net means that a missing site is quickly forgotten, and few go through the trouble of opening a proxy for you.

Another possible solution for the block is the use of RSS feeds, which are not stopped by the GFW. The problem of course, is that for people to subscribe to your feed, normally they need to find your site first, and direct searches or even linking sites that hit a reset connection will not bring them over to you, in most cases.

A block resistant site: the Freedom of Speech Host

So it becomes clear now that, to defeat the block, a site that wants to spread its information effectively cannot rely on the actions of its readers, especially if it wants to increase its reader base. The only solution to achieve this objective would be to design a website that is block resistant.

What does “block resistant” mean? In our sense, block resistant is a website that, in spite of being blocked by the GFW, it can be opened by the final users without any kind of active participation from their side.

The objective of this post is to see whether it would be possible to build a sort of blog-hosting service, similar to Blogger or WordPress.org, that would have this unblockable characteristic, therefore making it a perfect tool to give support to blocked activists in countries without freedom of speech.

In order to achieve this, a site would have to defeat at least 2 different blocks: the IP block and the URL block.

The IP block works by blocking access not from a single IP, but from whole subnets or groups of subnets. This is what explains that sometimes a website is affected by the content of other sites in the same server. To get over this block, some kind of system would have to be designed to serve the content of the websites through a myriad of different subnets (IPs), ideally from different geographic locations. A suggestion to achieve this is with some kind of network system, using the participation of many volunteers in the world, in a similar way as Tor or the SETI@home experiement.

The URL block: even if you defeat the IP block, the user would still have to type in a URL to get to your site, and this URL would have to be defined and stable, so that the users could actually remember it. The GFW blocks not only IPs, but also URLs, which means that the user’s request for a URL would be blocked at the border and perhaps never make it to the final servers. The solution to this seems complicated, considering our premise that no action (including installing software) is to be taken by the final user. The only way I can think of is to have somehow the URL directed to some sort of DNS server within China that is not physically possible to localize by the authorities. Then this server would convert it into changing IP addresses according to the servers available outside the country.

This is what we have been thinking about the fascinating world of the internet blocks. And I write it here for what it’s worth, in the hopes that more intelligent people (the hackers at chan 888?) find it and see if there is anything to be done about it.

It would certainly serve a useful purpose if such a hosting service as described could be set up. At a small level, it could provide some freedom of speech to oppressed activists. If it can be done at a larger scale, it would lead eventually, through the generalization of its use, to the end of GFW and of similar blocking systems in other countries.

It is not an easy task, and it would probably be expensive, but I am sure if it can be proven feasible there would be many sponsors ready to lend a hand. Somebody go for it.

UPDATE: After some long conversations with friends nerdier than me, I finally was convinced that the Freedom of Speech Host, or the Block Resistant site are impossible to implement effectively. That is because the URL block would be impossible to pass, as the CCP has the control at the level of the DNS. So the end user would be forced to take some kind of action such as typing in an IP directly, which defeats the whole ojective of the FOS host proxy (ie. that al users can access it normally without taking action)

I mean, I haven’t been writing anything for ages, is the Propaganda Department punishing me for being lazy? Has some big Chinese BBS  linked to me recently, is Uln hot now? As I was looking around for an answer, I found out that the Peking Duck blog was blocked more or less at the same time as mine, and it was asking the same kind of questions.

That is when I got this idea of the LIST, which I wrote on their comments. Everyone knows that GFW is unpredictable, it starts and stops and nobody ever knows why, if you don’t believe me look at this funny chronology. But this random behaviour usually affects only some websites, and never touches others. So necessarily, the guys at the GFW Control Deck are working with a number of websites that have been shortlisted beforehand.

I am quite sure of the existence of this LIST, because I noticed very precisely the moment my blog was shortlisted. It happened earlier this year with that political post that was picked by the New York Times. Since then I had strange things happening, with miniblocks now and then, a perceived slower speed loading in China, and, of course that particular Chаrter 08 post has been blocked ever since (even as the rest of the blog remained open). Also, look at that weird comment in Chinese in that post, where the guy says I am interfering in China’s internal affairs… could be a troll. Or could be not.

Anyway, my guess is that this blog and the PKD’s block have probably nothing to do with our recent activity, but rather with the tense atmosphere in the censors office these last weeks, after the Green Dam fiasco and the Google affair. At some point someone must have said: “hey, let’s block some more sites”, and we were unfortunately the next names on the LIST. And, unlike Google, I am afraid sites speaking specifically of politics are blocked permanently, such as this one, or this one. I hardly imagine the censors taking the trouble to monitor our blogs every day to see if we are behaving better. So my guess is, both for me and for PKD, that the block is here to stay and there is no solution.

… or perhaps there is?

You might have seen this manifesto of the Anonymous Netizens,  found on the RConversation blog. They promise some action on the 1st of July.  I like the document, it is well written and, unlike other efforts, it is very clever in that it sticks to its objective and doesn’t try to change the World from zero. It doesn’t ring very Chinese to me though

Look at these 2 extracts (but if you got time read it all):

For the freedom of the Internet, for the advancement of Internetization, and for our rights, we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are …  You are trying in vain to halt the wheels of history. Even with your technocratic reinforcements, you will not understand the Internet in the foreseeable future

….

NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization.

Perhaps it is just this anarchist instinct of mine, but I find the discourse inspiring, and I hope it makes some noise in China and local netizens here get the message. Because it works well to defeat the old nationalistic shield of the Chinese government against outside critics.

Not that I think the Attack announced on the 1st July is going to change much. These guys are not really Chinese, they are the people at the 4chan bbs, you can read a bit more about them here. They have done some interesting actions before, in particular against the Scientologists, and I am curious to see what is coming on the 1st July.

But however smart the guys are in the West, I am afraid they don’t have a chance in China. It is a completely different playing ground, they have no popular support here and as far as I know their BBS in the West have no links to the Chinese ones here.  I might be wrong, but I have the feeling that this is exclusively a Western initiative, perhaps with the participation of some overseas Chinese.

The thing with Western internet activists is that they seldom realize the massive size of the Chinese internet, and its limited connections with the outside World. We will speak about this some other day, but let me just say that the Chinese internet is an enormous island within the internet, an island that we all know is there and we all now it’s big, but we have no idea of what’s inside or how to get there. Something like Greenland, perhaps.

But I am digressing. I just meant to write: keep an eye on the Anonymous Netizens on the 1st July. They will not overturn the regime, they will not break the GFW or send the Nanny to the retirement home where she belongs. But they might -they just *might* – manage to ridicule the Chinese censors and expose them enough for all the Chinese to see what a bunch of incompetents they have in that Department. And how efficiently they are destroying the image of China in the World, and causing the country to loose face by the hectare.

And then perhaps someone in that office will decide that, after all, Chinayouren is not noxious for a harmonious society. Until then, I remain, blocked.

EDIT: self-harmonized my language to leave out the insults.

But this one I cannot let pass, it is too low and too gratuitous. It is sad: why does it have to be  China who tells the first Lies about President Obama, only 20 minutes into his presidency. This is how they respect one admirable man, and 1 Billion of their own listeners.  (h/t shanghaiist).

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Yes, he said that. And yes, they are on the wrong side.

Comments welcome.