Conclusions on blogs and censorship

Blogging one blog at a time

When coming to conclusions about my experience with Chinese blogs and government censorship, it seems there is far more than meets the eye. I want to focus my research in my final post, on the outcome of political discourse caused by blogs throughout China and the repercussions faced via government censorship.

When I first skimmed the surface on this topic, I began with censorship in China as a whole. As a result, I didn’t really know how blogging in China worked or how they were still being produced despite tight censorship. But looking further into it, I have found the little tricks that bloggers are using to get past detection. Some of the tricks include:

• Using euphemisms to continue conversations on specific topics
• Writing so many entries that when writing a comment that brings up certain ideas, it doesn’t get detected
• Using satire and images

An individual that paved the…

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Chinese Blogs and Political Discourse

Blogging one blog at a time

Chinese censorship is huge. It isn’t just social media sites or pornography sites, but anything that seems to condemn the Chinese government in any way or on the road to political discourse. This includes a huge amount of blogs. Last week I looked into the current censorship environment. Net Intiative reported in its 2004-2005 study of Chinese Internet Censorship that “China operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad reaching system of internet filtering in the world” (OpenNet Intiative, 2005). The censorship system is called The Great Firewall of China. I want to look into how these blogs are approached, do they reach a global audience and the way in which they can evade censorship.

In 2007, it was reported that there were 47 million bloggers in China with 72 million blogs (CNNIC, 2007). These statistics show the extensive nature of the blogosphere and the huge job that the government…

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Blog Culture in a highly censored China

Blogging one blog at a time

I have an interest in blogs and decided to look into blogging in China and the interactions between Government censorship and readership. I know a huge amount of websites are blocked by the Chinese government but didn’t know much about the way in which this interfered with blogs. I’m going to start off by looking into what sites and blogs are blocked and how individuals are evading this censorship.

Some mainstream websites that China is currently censoring includes:

• Google
• Wikipedia
• The Wall Street Journal
• Red Tube (or almost any other porn site)
• LinkedIn
• Facebook

Blog hosts that are blocked include:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Blogspot

I stumbled across a really interesting example of how individuals are accessing the internet. An app called Lantern has been introduced and allows people to access blocked sites through Lantern’s own servers or through Lantern users running as access points in the uncensored world. China has around…

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Looking at Gojira just a little bit closer…

Blogging one blog at a time

When I first wrote about my experience watching ‘Gojira’, I immediately thought to write about the context and history behind the angry ways of the monster. And of course, the animations (but who didn’t mention that). But when we have to look further than an experience and really delve into the brunt of things, I think I really learnt a lot. When reading my first post, I jumped straight into the history behind the story about the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Looking back, I just went straight into analysing because approaching it from an auto-ethnographical direction was new to me and I think it might take some practice. It’s been drilled into me throughout my degree to critically analyse, analyse, analyse!

I don’t think I have watched many Japanese films, which really got me thinking about the Japanese film industry. If this film had so much context and…

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My First Encounter of ‘Gojira’

Blogging one blog at a time

Autoethnography is a new term to me and one that I feel I haven’t been properly exposed to throughout my degree. It is a way to reflect on an experience connecting meanings and understandings of the findings. This will be especially recurrent within my reflection of Digital Asia throughout the semester (I think I’m going to learn a lot in this subject as Asian culture isn’t my strong point).

Until watching this movie in class, I was quite unaware to the origins of Godzilla. It has become a well known name that I bet most kids and adults these days could tell you about. But it’s the history and culture behind the big monster that really tells the history of a country left with the repercussions of war. ‘Gojira’ metaphorically speaks of the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings that saw Japan suffer as many civilians died or…

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