Blocked on Weibo

翻墙 (over the Great Firewall / fānqiáng) literally means crossing the wall, but is commonly translated as climbing over the Great Firewell—that is evading China’s network of structural, social, and legal controls by which it regulates Internet content.

Why it is blocked: China doesn’t deny that the Internet is tightly controlled in the country—with specific websites like Facebook and Twitter blocked, “immoral” content like pornography restricted, search results filtered, and individual blog posts containing politically sensitive material deleted. In fact, China openly admits and defends its Internet regulations, which are often implemented by private companies as a form of self-censorship at the government’s behest. However, criticizing this system is not acceptable.* A number of tools allow netizens to circumvent the blocks, giving them unfettered access to the Internet. (If you want to climb inside the Great Firewall and experience life as a Chinese Internet user, you can install China Channel, a Firefox add-on.) The U.S. government has been involved with funding some of these tools, including the controversial Falun Gong-designed Ultrasurf.

According to a 2010 survey, most climbers are university students who simply want to use Google search. Other findings show that only a small share of Chinese Internet users bother to use anti-censorship tools and are mostly satisfied with the domestic offerings available to them. However, even these users are often passively involved in anti-censorship measures when they engage in practices like using coded language on social media sites to evade censors.

*Fun fact: Though references to the Great Firewall are blocked on Weibo, Fang Binxing, the vilified architect and grand designer of it, is not. He was forced to close his Weibo account after irate Internet users showered him with abuse. The vitriol for him even extended into real life, with a student throwing a shoe at him and becoming a folk hero for it.

维基揭密 / 維基揭密 (WikiLeaks / Wéijījiēmì) is an online organization that publishes submissions of secret and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. 维基 is a transliteration of “Wiki” while the last two characters can be written in various ways (see note below for discussion of variations on word), all of which roughly mean “uncovering/explaining secrets.”

Why it blocked: China, like the U.S. is deathly afraid of government leaks and is no doubt concerned about what WL has in its treasure trove of secret documents. Already, Wikileaks has revealed Chinese willingness to abandon North Korea, as well as other embarrassing (if true) rumors like Wen Jiabao’s “disgust” with his wife’s corruption. In the U.S., merely even reading WikiLeaks cables may have repercussions on your job prospects, and just last week a U.S. Foreign Service Officer was dismissed for linking to WikiLeaks on his blog, among other allegations. Nothing similar exists in China at the moment. [Status - 3/12/12, 3/23/12: blocked]

Note: Both the above simplified and traditional versions have roughly the same number of Google hits.  Swaps for the third and fourth characters are common. “Jie” can be written as 解, meaning “explain,” or 揭, meaning “uncover.” “Mi” can be written as 秘, meaning “secret,” or 密, meaning “dense” (put together, 秘密, they form the word “secret”). Some of these alternative variations—for instance 维基解密, apparently the most popular way to translate the term, with roughly 9 million Google hits vs. less than a million for the two above blocked versions—are unblocked. 

无界网络 (Ultrasurf / Wujie wangluo) is a free Internet censorship circumvention tool. Ultrasurf was originally designed to enable internet users in China to safely bypass China’s Golden shield, but now has as many as eleven million users worldwide.

Why it is blocked: Besides the fact that the software punches a hole through China’s noted Great Firewall, it is also a product designed by the Falun Gong and funded by the U.S. government.

Note 1: Searching for the phrase “无界网络” is not only blocked on Weibo, but it will also cause your connection to the site to break, the only such phrase discovered thus far to cause such an action (searching for blogspot.com on Baidu does something similar). A user is locked out of Weibo for several minutes before they are allowed to reconnect.

Note 2: There have been allegations that Ultrasurf is possibly malware, or at the very least exhibits behavior that appears suspicious, a claim that is difficult to dispel because the source code has not been released (in order to prevent Chinese analysis), though others vigorously defend the software. As mentioned, recently it has been funded in part by the U.S. government and the Berkman Center at Harvard lauded its performance in 2007 (2010 report).

五毛 (literally, 50 cents / wumao), short for wumaodang or 50 Cent Party, is a pejorative term for Internet commentators hired by the Chinese government to post comments favorable towards party policies in an attempt to shape and sway public opinion on Internet message boards.

Why it is blocked: Though there has already been much media coverage about China’s professional web commentators and the government has openly acknowledged their presence, it still does no good (at least from the CCP’s perspective) to have accusations of “wumao” every time someone makes a pro-China commennt.