this page = www.efc.ca/pages/china

Anti-Censorhip Tools for People in China

Net Censorship in China


Tell us about something that should be added to this list: [email protected]

Useful Tools -- available to people within China


Useful Tools -- blocked by Chinese Government


Useful Tools -- still in development or testing


Background

The nature, target, and consequences of censorship in China are quite different from what we are used to in Canada. In China, Internet Service Providers are either state-run or state-licensed and cooperate fully with the government's desire to limit access to certain kinds of information, and presumably provide free access to web logs and contents of email messages. Contrary to our domestic obsession and paranoia about sex and young people and the resulting focus on child pornography, in China, the state doesn't much care about pornography, ... they care about political speech. Apparently, access to nytimes.com is blocked, while access to playboy.com is not. In Canada, people can be embarrassed, reprimanded, fired, or in very rare cases, jailed for accessing controversial/illegal information online. In China, they can be killed.

Although we Canadians think it might be easy to circumvent corporate/government control/censorship with techniques like Anonymous Remailers, Anonymous Web Surfing, Encrypted Email, etc., these methods are seldom used in Canada, and it isn't clear they are robust enough and sufficiently easy to use for your average person inside China who wants to get political viewpoints outside their state-approved sources.

If you have some practical knowledge on this topic, please contribute to this web page by sending email to: [email protected]


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