blocking educational websites=shooting yourself in the foot
Just back from a recent trip around China, where I discovered many wonderful things. Accessing academic information via publicly available websites, however, was not among them. My sense is that the Chinese filters create a major obstacle for
academic research, certainly from the Chinese side but perhaps from
outside of China as well. A few data points don’t make a theory, but a few data points are what I have so that’s what I’m reporting.
- a social sciences graduate student wanted to show me the most prominent academic Chinese sociology website http://blog.sociology.org.cn/. I couldn’t access it inside China and can’t access it now, from outside. I am able to access the cached website via Baidu, which shows me what’s there (e.g., discussion forums on latest sociological issues, research, theory, methodology, and “blogs” by prominent academic researchers) but none of the links work. The blogroll has other relevant sites including: http://community.sociology.org.cn/ [can’t access], http://www.1828.com.cn/blog [can’t access], the home page of Dr. Feng Gang, chair of the sociology department, Zhejiang University [this one works and also has space for graduate student discussions].
- when discussing with a humanities graduate student the difficulty of obtaining affordable academic books in English, I mentioned MIT’s Open Courseware, which offers syllabi, lecture notes, and detailed reading bibliographies in dozens of fields. It’d be a great help to Chinese grad students…if they could access it. The students I was with could get to the MIT home page only with a proxy, and once there could not access Open Courseware.
How crazy is it that China’s most advanced students cannot access online information and knowledge that would assist them in their learning? Or that foreign academics cannot access scholarly discussions in Chinese on Chinese servers? It’s one thing when sites are inaccessible because of language problems, and I understand that the Chinese government has its own reasons for filtering what it considers to be particularly sensitive political issues–but I don’t see the logic of making scholarly exchange so difficult.
No Wikipedia either.
Just as a data point, from Shanghai every one of those websites loads except http://www.1828.com.cn/blog, which is timing out for my US proxy and timing out from an SSH session to a server in the United States. In fact there was an article a few months back in the local paper (Xinmin Wanbao) about a group of students at Fudan University who are translating textual materials and adding subtitles to audiovisual materials from OpenCourseware.
Sooo… just goes to show the fragmented and inconsistent nature of the Great Firewall.
Mahn, none of that stuff works on my HK internet either. Pfft.
我们中国挺好的，但作为一个发展中国家自然有她的不足。我时刻以自己是中国人而自豪！
希望你们对我中国有信心。
Every one of them can be accessed —except http://www.1828.com.cn/blog,I'm in Xi’an..so it must be your problems!
CHECK CAREFULLY BEFORE U MAKE A CONCLUSION!!!
Thanks!
我在西安，除了http://www.1828.com.cn/blog不能访问外其他都可以访问，请您在没有弄清楚问题所在的时候不要轻易的下结论！！谢谢！！
中国是有问题，但是没有比夸大或者没有调查就下结论更无耻的事情了！！
Interesting observations, really set my mind thinking over the Nanny: how much is actually blocked here in China? I concluded not as much as we make out…. http://www.20six.co.uk/positivesolutions
Perhaps I didn’t make my main point clear. The issue is not whether a specific website is blocked from a specific computer or not. As Micah and many others have pointed out over the years, Chinese filtering is an on-again-off-again kind of thing. This is one of the reasons it’s so successful. The point is that academic or educational websites being blocked from ANY computer does not make sense, especially in China where it takes extraordinary individual and family sacrifice to attend graduate school. The Internet has already transformed scholarly exchange around the world. Chinese graduate students and professors should be given the *best* tools with which to view others’ work and to share their views with others.
I’m a normal netizen in beijing,and I acessed the links you gave without any diffcult except 1828.I don’t know what’s your problem,but if you draw the conclusion before check it seriously then you are demonizing china。
I think I know what you mean, but to prove your opinion you have to give some “academic or educational websites” which are truly blocked.
I have had no problems accessing all of these sites here in Shenzhen either (with the exception of 1828).
I can also confirm what Jason says – many sites that are accessible to me here in Shenzhen are not accessible to me in Hong Kong.
Many Westerners I know, are not happy unless they are demonising the CCP, and spend much of their time looking for reasons to do so.
I am currently debating the nature of China’s governance and society with a Hong Kong based academic from the UK named Sojourner on my site – most of his criticisms of China stem from his universalising abstractions, via European Enlightenment ideology – which I argue, is a form of ethnocentrism. And that’s what I charge most bloggers who run China-related sites with – ethnocentrism. Their attitude reveals itself everytime they rush to accuse the CCP of blocking sites they can’t access here on the mainland, even though most censorship here in China takes the form of self-censorship, and all too often the sites are accessible here anyway, depending on what server your commuter happens to go through. The exact same phenomena applies to most countries, which is why accessinig sites in places like Hong Kong is also very much a case of hit and miss.