A New (Beijing) Year

It doesn't quite fit into Backpacking in a Suit, but I thought people might find it interesting, so I'm doing a cross-posting! The return of the E-mail Journal (those who have been reading my stuff for a few years might remember these with either fondness or hatred) is getting syndicated throughout the WWWWW (Wayne's Whole Wide Web World.)

Full entry / Excerpt.....
"Well, here is the return of the Email Journal, since I'm back in China and I can't easily access any of my favorite pieces of social media. No Blogger, no Facebook, no Twitter. Also no Wiki'ing something, and even my own website is still blocked because I use address forwarding. From my brief experience, and from the analysis of some friends, it seems that censorship here has gotten bolder and more encompassing, while at the same time actually losing some of its effectiveness. The government wants to avoid social networks it can’t control, and in their place have stemmed a number of China-specific social networks and micro-blogging sites that the government can exert control over. Yet on social networks of any kind, information has to be posted first to be blocked, and often those precious few minutes of being shared publicly is enough to send the information around the country. It’s a cat and mouse game that’s still playing out, but suffice it to say that the censorship annoys me and seems pretty pointless at the end of the day. Whatever though, the mice are still running around, and that means there’s still hope for the future."