The Great Internet Firewall in China has been a bit of a pain while I am here in China. For one, they indescriminantly block ALL blogger.com access. Google helps them by also refusing to show Chinese users "cached" copies of the web pages from a goole search.

But China does not censor digg.com (nor do they censor Blue Dot). There are a great variety of services where Chinese users can upload their own posts on the internet. Blogger is just one, and it seems a massive overkill to block the whole site with the millions of innocuous blogs there.

I found that I was able to VPN to my corporate network from a Chinese computer, and then circumvent the Chinese Firewall but having all my traffic go through our US-based network. I'm sure chinese dissidents would be able to do the same thing quite easily.

I would hope that China would soon learn that it can't truly control the flow of information, and that it is doing more harm than good in trying to restrict large swaths of internet sites from the Chinese people.

Quoted: The operations of U.S. Internet companies in China is attracting concern in Congress after years of complaints from free speech and human rights advocates about these firms aiding Beijing's ability to censor content. Experts say China is assisted in its censorship efforts by hardware and software provided by many U.S. technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

I did find this page from google.cn....I wonder if this is just a transient error that will be "fixed" by the Google censors (Or perhaps the Chinese government will take down this *.cn web site shortly?)

Google China image search on Tiananmen Square. I DO see a couple of pages on the 1989 massacre - at cryptome.cn. I thought these were forbidden topics in Google's agreement with the Chinese government.