Freezing Winter for Internet in China

My friends Lv Xinxin comes from Beijing today and we had a nice lunch with other friends from websites. We chatted a lot about the status of many of our friends – most of them run websites.

Xinxin brought me back to the year of 2005. I said so, because 2005 is the Spring for Internet in China. The global Internet recovered from the Internet bubble crisis in 2003 to 2004, and in China, the real beginning was 2005. Many websites emerged at that time, and we had interesting gathering so frequently at that time. I got to know Xinxin at that time, and I got to know many of my current friends in the Internet space in that year.

In 2006, people were busy developing their sites, and in 2007, many of them faced big challenge in both financial sides, and from business model side. In 2008, I started to hear bad news of shutdown of websites. Many of others were just trying very hard to keep their head above the water. In 2009, it is the end of many sites. Many sites went bankrupt due to financial reasons – very reasonable, but to my greatest angry, many of them were shutdown in this new round of Internet cracking down.

Today, I heard some other bad news about websites.

It is obvious to me that THEY are tightening the Internet control. There are rumor that they will implement something called “whitelist” for Internet sites outside China. The rumor was, only those sites who register with the Chinese government can be accessed by people in China. I just don’t believe it. It is so naive to think about this idea, but many naive, and impossible measures were already taken that I am not 100% sure that they won’t do stupid things like this.

12 thoughts on “Freezing Winter for Internet in China

  1. Let me give you a hint.

    THEY have stopped providing Internet in XinJiang for 6 months.

    If they did so in XinJiang, why couldn’t they do such thing in the whole mainland of China when some extreme situations happened?

  2. Sad sad sad! they keep doing this, but they cant just simply forget about vpn and so, it seems like 1984, god!

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  4. Canada is known as “The True North Strong and Free”. We pray that some day soon you will know TRUE freedom in beautiful China.

    How sad…

  5. With no access to Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, Youtube etc, the Chinese internet is developing in isolation from the rest of the world.

  6. 我用了也许知道的名字之后就用超级考拉的名字了,现在我的博克的地址是http:/bestkaola.info,我也是从05年开始写的,但是我不会停下来,因为我养活我的个人小站比起养活一家公司来说要容易得多。所以,当很多人都消失的时候,我还是会继续写的,只不过换了个名字,从听景777到酱油小子,再到工具镶,我只是想说我还是在继续写着。

  7. well, this is certainly not good at all! this should be made known to the “internet generation” in China.

    anyhow, what is the root cause behind that? who is the chief in charge of the media control?

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