Internet police rice and sausage

"The Chinese government rocks, dude! China spends its money on its infrastructure, either of the two US parties elected will spend it on bullying the world and consolidating power. -- And your media will keep us all afraid of government-approved, gun-toting mental-cases the government turns out on our streets, and ever-shaking in fear, as some little half-man, old-allied, lunatic makes us take off our shoes to board an airplane, because our government don't give a sh..!. You guys suck! Give us back our country you fu...n' thieves!
Who needs a fake multi-party system of the same old turnips picked from the same ol' turnip patch by the same ol' turnip farmers and brought to the market by the same 'ol turnip peddlers?"

Bedtime for Democracy!Chinese view of democracy: Posted by "eightyeight" on the China Daily's forum, http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?gid=2&tid=561656&page=4

APRIL 10, 2007: My last post appears to be an application to be 'special entertainer' to an authoritarian-hypercapitalist corruption machine.

The point is my first impression of the system here (ie Songyuan City not Tibet) is that it's not really that far from a benevolent dictatorship. I wanted to show how favourably it compares to Western, or at least Anglo-, 'liberal-democratic' governments. Songyuan is a long way from Tibet or Xinjiang (the Occupied Territories), just like Iraq is a long way from London or Perth. Predictably, however, the good ol' boys in Beijing have already set about subtly letting me know they don't need my services.

They quite openly, militantly persecute Falun Gong followers, claiming it's a cult that would be persecuted anywhere. Trouble is, i can't even get to the Falun Gong Wikipedia page to find out even the basic details. And nor can i access any page that includes any close variation of "Falun Gong". You can't actually access Wikipedia at all unless you go through a 'proxy server'. It's banned.

The 'proxy server' is supposed to give you access to banned pages, and it works for some. It seems to get you around the first level of censorship - probably some automatic web-address based banning thingo. I can get onto Wikipedia and read all about Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution and the millions who starved and everything else. I can even read about Tiananmen Square - the place, that is.

When i clicked from there onto 'Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989' it was loading up fine for a few seconds. It's a very long page and i watched the scroll bar get steadily smaller as it neared completion. The title, intro, contents and images appeared and i started reading for about 2 seconds. Then it suddenly just switched to "Cannot find server".

I was very scared the first time this happened because it clearly wasn't being filtered out by some automatic machine. It seemed to me to be some kind of manual override, as though a buzzer just went off in Beijing somewhere and an internet policeman jumped across to hit the 'disconnect' button. Thereby becoming aware of who i am - the other day a policeman came past to check who was living in the apartment. He wanted our passports, so i showed him copies, though i should have refused. He was doing the same for everyone though, i heard him doorknocking his way towards us, so It's not really much different to the census in Australia. But it's had the highly desirable effect of making me expect a ransacked apartment whenever i arrive home.