Chinese gov is ridiculous. My girlfriend made a one word posting on the Chinese clone of facebook that read "freedom". The post disappeared in minutes and she received a private message warning her that her account may be deleted if she continues making such posts.
One upside is that Chinese people seem to be a little more tech savvy. ie. many of them are forced to learn about proxy servers so they can go around the blocking.
Edit: By Chinese facebook, I meant the Chinese CLONE of facebook. Facebook itself is totally blocked in China.
One common misconception is that all censorship is done automatically based on keywords. While it's true that internet searches in particular, and visits to banned websites are greeted with a connection reset, the censorship of message boards is done by hordes of low-paid individual workers (the "50-cent party" [1]) that are local to each district. Your girlfriend's post (which was a one-word post, and an inflammatory one at that) was probably spotted by whichever worker(s) were responsible for monitoring that message board.
When such a post is removed, it's typically referred to by netizens as being "harmonized", a play on Hu Jintao's "Harmonious Society" slogan [2].
You should check out the archives of a site like chinasmack or chinahush[3], who have translated summaries of popular chinese message board topics and gives a good feel of the day-to-day life of a chinese netizen.
I'm in the middle of setting up a website in China. The way things go is that you have to get the icp license. To get it, you have to agree that you will censor any user generated content that should be harmonized (guidelines are not very precise, but the chinese government regularly provide a list of topics that are not allowed for the season). We actually outsource our censoring to a chinese company for 500RMB/month as it'd be a hassle to hire someone only for this.
On the other hand, our website is bilingual, and we don't really need to monitor the english part since the government doesn't care...
Not trying to doubt you, but was it really just a one word post that elicited that reaction? Did the message come from Facebook or someone else? Is this a common occurrence?
I'm trying to wrap my head around how the whole thing works. On one hand, mundane stuffs are monitored, on the other hand, you have stuffs like these freely discussed:
According to wikipedia, this is on the 12th most popular site in China.
I think the censors operate on very crude keyword filters. As long as you avoid the few obvious keywords, it's not that easy to get caught. The domestic web sites get around the censor by agreeing to open backdoors for the filters, yet at the same time turn a blind eye to the real disruptive stuffs that got around it.
I suspect the location of the post makes a difference. If, for example, it was posted on the wall of an anti-censorship group that is decidedly opposed to the actions of the Chinese government, then posting "freedom" there could quite easily be seen as expressing support for the group and therefore "disharmony". Probably it wasn't quite as clear-cut as that (such an overtly anti-censorship group would probably be inaccessible on the Chinese Facebook anyway), but the context probably had something to do with it; I'd be curious to hear what it was.
But it's a pretty bad sign when, seeing someone use the word "freedom", your immediate reaction is suspicion, trying to decide whether or not it shows that the speaker is an enemy. And that's how it must be for the Chinese internet police who make decisions like this one.
Let's not go crazy here. China is bad. But just like comparing people you disagree with to Hitler is silly, so is saying a government is worse than the ones in 1984. The only government on Earth that even comes close is North Korea's. That is not to excuse any of the awful, repressive regimes out there, just to say that no, they are not worse than a fictional regime specifically created to be the scariest thing Orwell could imagine.
besides using VPN (we were using anchorshield back then but now it's blocked) I was using gladder. A firefox plugin which allows you to use a proxy only in a tab. Great plugin. Helped me a lot.
Tor and almost any website mentioning or hosting it is blocked, on top of that my experience with Tor is that it is no longer usable.
First users were forced to use a relay, then relay IP's started getting banned, and now I think that the government has found some method to prevent connections to the Tor network completely (I'm not sure how).
Slowly but surely the screws are being tightened, more and more of the western net is becoming unavailable. I guess already 30-35% of all sites linked to on HN are blocked.
The relays still work, the mechanisms to share the relay addresses have changed a bit and continue to do so. Tor's traffic looks like regular https traffic so it's very difficult to block. The tor project makes China one of it's priorities and continually play an escalation war with China's government.
So if it does get blocked its not for long.
I wish I could help you with more specific information off the top of my head, but I fortunately don't have to use relays. I am willing to do some research and share the results here if you like.
When I was over there we often used a simple proxy server, like pimpmyip or zend2. Occasionally we were not able to access these and had to look around for something else.
One upside is that Chinese people seem to be a little more tech savvy. ie. many of them are forced to learn about proxy servers so they can go around the blocking.
Edit: By Chinese facebook, I meant the Chinese CLONE of facebook. Facebook itself is totally blocked in China.