China’s insomniac twitterati were on fire this afternoon U.S. time, powered no doubt by much caffeine and sugar in the the wee hours of the morning in China. Half an hour before Google’s David Drummond posted his announcement that Google.cn is now effectively operating from Google.com.hk, Guangzhou-based open source programmer @LEMONed broke the news that google.cn was being redirected to the Hong Kong service. Reacting to the news, @wentommy quipped: “One Google, One World; One China, No Google.”
As of now (still early morning in Beijing), Google.com.hk is accessible from mainland China although specific search results for sensitive terms result in a browser error – or in other words, are blocked. Same as it’s always been for sensitive searches on Google.com from inside mainland China. This is network filtering and would happen automatically as part of the “great firewall” Internet filtering system.
The ball is now in the Chinese government’s court in two ways:
1) Whether they will block all of google.com.hk, which until now has not been blocked. If they are smart they will just leave the situation as is and stop drawing media attention to their censorship practices. The longer this high profile fracas goes on, the greater Chinese Internet users awareness will be about the lengths to which their government goes to blinker their knowledge of the world. That may inspire more people to start learning how to use circumvention tools for getting around the censorship. Chinese censorship is only effective if a large percentage of the population isn’t very conscious of what they’re missing. As I like to explain it: if you’re born with tunnel vision you assume it’s normal until somehow you’re made aware that life without tunnel vision is both possible and much better. The longer this story remains in the headlines, the more people will become conscious of their tunnel vision and think about ways to eliminate it.