Perhaps, I am missing the point but, as I have written time and again in this blog, during my time in China I have been able to access more or less everything. Now, that has not always been without its complications and there were times when I have used a proxy and there were times when the connection was slow, slow, slow! Nevertheless, I have been able to access more or less everything so much so it is difficult to justify the "more or less" qualification.
The obsession in the western media where it is continually cried out that China is breaking its promise to allow free access to all information is, therefore, a trifle amusing but also indicative of the very superficial way in which news is discovered, manufactured and reported. One particular report from a Jane Macartney in today's "Times" is particularly revealing, she writes, "Sites related to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned by China as an illegal cult, remained off limits. Chinese-language pages linked to dissidents and to the Tibetan government-in-exile were still out of bounds."1 Now I am not sure what promises the Chinese government made but aren't the journalists, all 30,000, who are coming for the Olympic Games supposed to be reporting on the games. Or, is there a sudden surge in interest in the Falun Gong, whose name has already been mentioned in the five weeks prior to the olympics more often than in the five previous years. Anyway, there is Jane and thousands like her, sitting at her keyboard and googling words like, "Falun Gong", "Dalai Lama", "Tibetan government in exile" and crying foul when she finds the pages related to them either opening very slowly or not at all. One actually wonders, how many of the 30,000 journalists (the BBC alone is sending some 400) will actually be reporting on the Olympics.
Finally, has anyone tried to access the Hezbollah's official website recently?
1 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article4438891.ece
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