*Offer not valid in China

There are now, officially, four kinds of lies. You know the first three: Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Add to those old favorites this gem, straight from Athens. I think we’ll call this one the John McEnroe lie. It’s the kind where you bite your lip, squint a bit, and finally shout, “You cannot be serious!” at the computer screen. This one comes from a Chinese official (ID’s as Yang Xiaokun on The Peking Duck) speaking at a UN conference in Greece:

“I don’t think we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I’ve heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it’s blocked. I’m sure I don’t know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.”

Well, in case he was wondering, here’s what I can’t get to (without a proxy): BBC News is off-limits, as is the Berkeley-based China Digital Times. One of my favorite groups, Reporters Without Borders, is also outside the Great Firewall. Wikipedia just got itself off the bad list, but my Chinese students can’t read it in their native tongue. BlogSpot is once again on the blacklist, and today its source, Blogger Beta (thought not the stable Blogger), appears to be down as well. I know these sites are blocked, not merely unavailable because of some technical error, because the censors are so easily circumvented.

There was a brief period when I couldn’t get on any *.gov sites in the US. I found this when I tried to look up something from the USDA. When that didn’t work, I tried the State Dept. and the White House. It may have been a glitch, and it may not have been. Those are back up at the moment, but really, what did vegetables ever do to China?

A report from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society found 19,023 sites blocked in China but accessible in the US. A sampling of what’s blocked is fascinating.

Oh, and just in case this guy didn’t sound deluded enough, he followed up with this:

“Some people say that there are journalists in China that have been arrested. We have hundreds of journalists in China, and some of them have legal problems. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression.”

Again, a little fact checking is a wonderful thing. According to Reporters Without Borders, at least 32 journalists were in prison throughout China as of Jan. 1, 2006. Also, here’s the 2005 report on China from CPJ.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 5:51 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.