In the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, which began Friday, English language media have published countless stories on China and its capital. But many of these stories echo each other and few break new ground in the world’s understanding of China. Many emphasize a consistent set of outside concerns and, in portraying conflict, oversimplify the wide variety of viewpoints to be found even without leaving Beijing.

Reporting in China is not easy, and difficult conditions while pounding pavement encourage an over-reliance on the easily accessible but skewed commentary online. After the unrest in Tibet this year and demonstrations on the Olympic Torch Relay route, especially in France, a torrent of nationalist commentary and push-back emerged from people who thought China was being portrayed unfairly, and there were dozens of stories on “angry Chinese youth.”

Writers (including this one) have also written frequently about internet censorship and efforts to circumvent restrictions. In the last year, LexisNexis finds more than 350 mentions of “great firewall,” one of several ways reporters refer to China’s online controls.

But internet phenomena can only be so big in China. If the government’s July numbers are correct, the country now has 253 million internet users, more than any other country in the world. But with a population of 1.33 billion, that’s still only 19 percent of the population. That’s compared to more than 70 percent in the United States, the second largest national internet population, and a global average of 21 percent, according to Kaiser Kuo at Ogilvy.

What happens online in China, therefore, doesn’t involve most of the laobaixing, a term used widely in China to refer to “regular people.” Further, in a poll conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 80 percent said they thought the internet should be controlled, and just as many said the government should be in charge of those controls.

Even if reporters do get off the internet and mingle with the 80 percent of Chinese who don’t log on, it’s impossible to tell the full story of how the laobaixing see the Olympics. But I’ll relate one story that unfolded over several weeks in my former neighborhood in central Beijing.

Across from the entrance to my alley, the flags of the Communist Party, China, and the Olympic rings flew above a small home that had until recently also been a dried fruit and beverage store. The residents had erected the flags and plastered much of the exterior with pictures of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping (whose son still lives in a large complex nearby, according to neighbors), and the current Chinese president and premier, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.

Their home had been marked for demolition in a pre-Olympic beautification effort. In a pattern that played out dozens or hundreds of times during Olympic preparations, the residents were concerned that they might not get sufficient compensation and resisted leaving as long as possible.

On several evenings when the demolition was thought to be imminent, hundreds of neighbors and passers-by gathered on the street waiting and talking. A police van and some plain clothes officers kept an eye on the crowd most of the time, but people were outspoken and opinions divergent.

Some echoed the residents’ slogan posted atop the small home, “Premier Wen Jiabao should look out for the livelihood of the laobaixing.” Some said they thought the family should just move out, or were sympathetic but thought the Olympic flag shouldn’t be involved. Some spoke of frustration with the Olympics for making life so complicated this year in Beijing, and some said they were proud to welcome the world to their city, despite recent inconveniences. Some neighbors didn’t care one way or another about the Games but were strained by higher food prices, which they attributed to a ban on outside trucks entering Beijing. Others mused that it’s been an unusually hot summer and wondered why I kept wearing long pants.

The home was torn down in late July. The internet is still censored. Some people are enflamed about perceived anti-China statements. But if a news story makes any of this sound simple or un-nuanced, remember the multitude of opinions on one street corner.

Note: This column was prepared for a different publication that elected not to publish it. (Please forgive the lack of hyperlinks.) It was written about a week ago in Berlin, and I’m posting now from Bologna, Italy. This site will remain mellow in the coming days as I make my way to the United States, where I begin graduate school studying East Asia next month.

Anyone living in China and communicating with the Western Hemisphere or Europe knows that even when government controls aren’t slowing down the internet, any disruption of undersea fiber optics in the Pacific can bring traffic to a crawl.

From MIT’s Technology Review, via Japan Probe and Foreign Policy, comes a map of global fiber projects slated and in progress. This is a screenshot of the Pacific, taken from TR’s global interactive map.

According to the article accompanying the map, global international transmissions are about 11.0 terabits per second. As I wrote at Sinobyte, one cable is supported by Google, Japan’s KDDI, and others. Another, the Trans-Pacific Express, recently won approval early this year from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The internet is unusually sluggish today. I wrote a bit about some possible reasons why at Sinobyte.

Blogspot has re-disappeared, MSN Messenger is inaccessible from an artsy Beijing cafe, searches for Carrefour are just back from going unanswered, and the spring sky is clear. It’s the 89th anniversary of China’s May Fourth Movement.

In 1919, student activism took a powerful and still-honored turn for the patriotic in China. On May 4, thousands of students gathered at Tiananmen to protest the Treaty of Versailles and its treatment of previously German-held territory in Shandong Province, which was given to Japan rather than back to China.

Today, students have been at the forefront of recent demonstrations of national pride in the face of demonstrations against the Olympic flame as it toured the world. After a French demonstrator went after a woman carrying the torch in a wheelchair, anti-French sentiment was converted to demonstrations and boycotts directed against the French megamart Carrefour.

Go read the full post here.

Viewing U.S. presidential politics from thousands of miles away is a bit of a relief for someone like me. But I still enjoy watching the debates in webcast form to keep an eye on the tone of competition. I should say, I enjoyed it. Heading over to MSNBC.com to catch up on the recent Democratic debate, I was stopped at the door for holding the wrong internet passport:

MSNBC is not the only site to block visitors from some countries. The music site Rhapsody refuses me service while in China. Google Video also refuses my requests, though it at least apologizes:

Thanks for your interest in Google Video.

Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.

We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.

These are just the few cases I can remember off the top of my head. Many other sites have refused service since I moved to China. As of now, I don’t know how far-reaching these restrictions are, but I don’t have any reason to believe it’s just China. I have some memory of reading about sites that only work in the United States or their home country.

There are several possibilities as to why this happens. Here are a few:

• Copyright concerns. Rhapsody, for instance, may not be ready to defend its delivery of copyrighted music to some countries. Though there are no such issues with a U.S. presidential debate, MSNBC may simply have disabled video delivery abroad because of other copyright concerns, thereby unnecessarily narrowing the reach of its non-copyright-sensitive material.
• Money. Streaming video is an expensive service. It involves either a large cost in development and maintenance or large fees to an established streaming service such as Akamai to run the show. If streaming is ad-supported and advertisers aren’t interested in an audience outside of the United States, then there is a financial incentive not to serve foreign visitors. (When I listen to podcasts from U.S. National Public Radio programs, they often ask me to support my local station so that the podcast can be paid for. The smarter pitches, which acknowledge that I may not have a local station, ask me to support the program’s home station.)
• Self-censorship. Perhaps the most insidious reason would come into play if it turns out that these blocks were specifically directed toward China. It might represent a decision by U.S. content providers to censor what they provide to Chinese visitors in hopes of preventing a move by the Chinese government to block their sites overall. This is not an unreasonable fear, as we have seen with Google’s Blogger and YouTube services, among others. These sites may not always be blocked, but uncertainty about their accessibility makes it unlikely that advertisers would choose these sites to reach a Chinese audience.

Amidst recent rumors about Facebook’s possible entry into the Chinese market with a facebook.cn service, some very smart people have been remarking on a “silo” effect when national networks are created for otherwise transnational services, making cross-border communication more difficult. As Rebecca MacKinnon writes:

If they do end up having to create different Facebook “silos” in order to be compliant with Chinese government censorship requirements (and maybe other governments with other language services too), it isn’t just a missed opportunity to provide a great global, multilingual service that many people would find incredibly exciting.

The silo-ing of social networking sites like Facebook (and MySpace China already) is a sadly missed opportunity to build bridges of communication and understanding between the Chinese-speaking world and the English-speaking world.

The same applies when information is limited to borders. The key here of course is that these decisions are business decisions. MySpace, Facebook, and MSNBC are designed to make money from their audience, not foster international connections. I just hope they find ways to do both.

This is a preliminary report, but while working out a technical problem on Transpacifica over the last hour, I have discovered that in the last few minutes, YouTube went from being blocked to unblocked. For the record, I’m browsing from a wireless connection that accesses the internet through a CNC Beijing IP.

This would seem to support either or both of the dominant lines of speculation among bloggers and media as to the reason for the block: that it was related to the 17th Party Congress, which concluded a little over a week ago, or because of the launch of a Chinese version of the site.

That said, both the Taiwan and Hong Kong versions are accessible from here.

I’ve been busy recently in Beijing and watching a lot of good stories go right by. You’ll forgive a Colorado native for using a baseball analogy: It’s time to make sure I don’t strike out looking. Here’s a quick summary of transpacific pitches I wish I’d had time to swing at.

Greener Beijing?
• Will Beijing’s air be ready for the Olympics? The Worldwatch Institute has a good summary of what’s being done, who’s doing it, and what the challenges are, from Yongfeng Feng, a journalist for China Guangming Daily.
• Alex Pasternack picks up on a Christian Science Monitor story on the emergence of short-term bike rental service in Beijing. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned here is that folding bikes, trendy here despite being a pain to ride, have been banned on the subway recently to prevent overcrowding. Razor scooter, anyone?

Internet Filtering and Reactions
• Blogspot is blocked, again. It came back online along with Flickr, which I have just noticed is also blocked. Firefox users in the P.R.C. can use “Access Flickr!” to get those photo feeds back working.
• The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted the Global Online Freedom Act (H.R. 275) out of committee. The law, according to Forbes.com, would “penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million if they cooperate with the technological surveillance of political dissidents or share technology and information used for ‘Internet-restricting’ purposes.”
• Rebecca MacKinnon has smart commentary as usual on this issue. Go read what she writes, but here’s her bottom line:
  

  GOFA’s intentions are honorable in many ways. I think many of the people who support it certainly have honorable intentions. I know and respect many of them, despite having had some pretty heated arguments with some members of the human rights groups who say they support it for strategic reasons. But from where I sit in Hong Kong, this proposed legislation comes off as something that my Chinese friends who hate censorship and surveillance would find arrogant, patronizing, and interventionist, with the likely result that it would kill U.S. tech companies’ ability to do business in China in the first place - a result which by the way they don’t think would enhance their freedom.

• Also from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I haven’t mentioned yet that Chairman Tom Lantos is calling Yahoo’s Jerry Yang back to Congress under suspicion of misleading Congress in previous testimony. Go check with MacKinnon on this, too. She’s been on the story since a civil society group published a document that contradicted Yahoo’s statement that they did not know the nature of the investigation when they turned over information on reporter Shi Tao to Chinese authorities.
• At Wired, a writer with firsthand experience being monitored on a reporting trip in China declares that the “Great Firewall” is futile. Maybe, but I had to enable Tor to get the full article to load. The article is a good read though for those interested in Oliver August’s experiences talking to Chinese dissidents.
• Wikipedia’s Chinese-language service was crippled by the mainland’s block, reports Eva Woo at BusinessWeek.com.

In other news…
• From the Tokyo Auto Show, Michael J. Dunne who works on China for J.D. Power and Associates, writing in the Detroit News, notes that the talk is about China, not Japan. My favorite is the writer’s casual contextual note about when his cohort got interested in China: “Fascination with the China market started when the Middle Kingdom first challenged Japan for sales leadership. Two years ago, Chinese bought 5.3 million vehicles, just shy of the 5.7 million cars and trucks sold in Japan.”
• U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said she sees protectionism in both countries as a threat to U.S.–China trade.
• Relatedly, Andy Scott at China Briefing Blog ventures a coinage for China’s WTO practices: “Compliance With Chinese Characteristics.”
• It’s not just the United States hosting the Dalai Lama. Japan’s doing it too.
• The questionably hyphenated Trans-Pacific Express will for the first time link the China and the United States with an undersea telecommunications cable.

If you can see this photo and you’re in China, Flickr’s available. But so much for my video feed.

Thomas Crampton reports, and a quick check confirms: YouTube videos now unavailable at least from my seat in Beijing. The standard “connection reset” tactic is being used. This comes at the same time as previous blocks on Blogger and Flickr apparently have been lifted. I’ve even been getting intermittent function out of the FeedBurner relays that have been plaguing so many China-oriented bloggers. I even heard that some have gotten through to the BBC.

[UPDATE 12:59 p.m.]: Ken Wong has noticed that Google Blogsearch has also disappeared. He asks: 黑色星期四？ (”Black Thursday?”)

[UPDATE II 5:35 p.m.]: Commenters all over the web are looking for a circumvention method. I have my issues with this service, but Hotspot Shield, introduced by “花崗齋雜記 Jottings from the Granite Studio” seems to have the bandwidth to handle YouTube.

[UPDATE III Oct. 31]: YouTube appears to be back.

Readers who follow the developments of China’s internet censorship efforts may have heard that the Google-owned syndication service Feedburner has been added to the list of sites usually blocked for users in China. There’s some dispute as to whether it’s nationwide or confined to one large ISP, but one way or another, it’s been blocked for me. This entry summarizes a problem and the solution I have implemented. Warning: This is a relatively technical post, but it’s nothing too complicated I think.

Background: Users in China can reach this site directly. They can also subscribe to my Feedburner-powered RSS feed via Google Reader, which is not blocked. Some other RSS aggregators have been reported to be blocked, but a classic aggregator, Bloglines, still seems to be accessible at the moment.

Source of the Problem: Feedburner has a useful feature for publishers. It can be set to track how many people click on specific links from inside a RSS reader. The result is that publishers who get most of their readership from RSS subscribers get the same type of feedback that’s available when people visit the site directly.

The way this works is that Feedburner creates a relay page for each link, and users stop momentarily on Feedburner’s very fast servers before being directed to the linked page. In my experience outside of China, the user does not even notice this process. The publisher then knows that the link has been clicked, and can plan future content with a better understanding of the audience.

The problem for Chinese users is that that momentary stopover at Feedburner happens on a blocked address, so following any link from a tracking-enabled feed results in a “reset connection” or “timeout” that really amounts to a virtual brick wall—popularly known as the “Great Firewall of China.”

Partial Solution: After an exchange last night with Feedburner’s Rick Klau on their very well-run support forum, we determined that the best I can do right now is to simply disable this extra level of tracking. Now, links in my syndicated posts go directly to their target. This means the system is seamless for users in China, but I learn nothing about what links are getting clicks. For me, that’s an acceptable sacrifice since I write from and about China.

Another issue we discussed was Feedburner’s “FeedFlare” feature, which adds links for “E-mail this article” and “Add to del.icio.us” and such to each post. Currently, they do not appear for users in China because they are constructed as dynamically-created images to reflect comment counts and other data. I proposed that the image code include the standard “alt” parameter to accommodate users in China (and visually-impaired users, on whose behalf the W3C suggests that we always include descriptive information about what’s in an image).

Thanks to Feedburner for giving this problem quick attention, and I hope we make progress. I have some ideas about how I might get this tracking information back, but I’ll leave that for another day, if it works.

[UPDATE 9/28/07: Danwei proposes another solution, which is to provide a feed through Feedsky, a similar service, for China-based users. I'm hesitant to split up the subscriber base, and I do look forward to the day Feedburner stats are integrated with Google Analytics. But I may consider this in the future.]