China Law Blog

This information is useful.

I often read in the press, and on many China-related blogs, references to the so-called "Great Firewall of China", yet throughout the five years that I lived and worked in China, I was never starved for Internet information highly critical of China. True, certain sites, like Amn*sty International and all of the T1betan Independence support sites such as TIN are blocked, but I was always able to find the same criticisms, with references to TIN, Amn*sty etc., from a variety of alternative web sources. While the actual number of websites that are blocked in China may very well be quite large, I suspect that as a percentage of the world's total number of existing websites, the figure would be very small, tiny even - perhaps less than one percent. I really don't know though. What would be really interesting (and useful) to know, is just how many sites, roughly, are blocked, and what percentage of the world's total number of existing websites that number represents. I suspect the "Great Chinese Firewall" to be somewhat of an overstatement, to be frank.