A few weeks ago, when Tim Burroughs of China Economic Review sent me his quarterly reminder that I had a column to write, YouTube was still being blocked. It seemed like a shoo-in topic. By the time I started writing the column, however, YouTube was (thankfully) unblocked again. That rather took the edge off the topic, but I wrote the column anyway.

At essentially the same time I was writing. however, Yahoo was getting roasted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Tim asked me to tackle that instead, which I did. But having got that column off to him, I am now going to post the orphaned YouTube column here. (His exact words were something along the lines of, "I think what's happening with Yahoo is a little more important than expats being without YouTube for a couple of weeks.")

Well, yes. God bless editors. But let's not diminish the importance of access to YouTube. After all, search engine controversies come and go. But Internet video p*rn --and whatever this is-- is forever.

So this is a bit late for a blog post, but here it is anyway: 

The day YouTube went dark
Worrying hints of a future without the Numa Numa

On October 16th YouTube went dark in China. Across the country, hardened expatriates who had shrugged off the blockings of Blogspot, Wikipedia and Flickr were left in anguish. Ahead stretched dark workdays bereft of the drip feed of bite-size videos that has in less than two years woven itself into the fabric of modern expatriate life.

It was a calamity, but a short lived one. After two weeks of cold sweats and crippling shakes (it felt like an eternity), YouTube reappeared. Internet-addicted expats in China were once again able to get a desperately needed fix of “Chad Vader” and “Ask a Ninja”. Reconnected to the mainline of Western zeitgeist, thready pulse rates dropped in the foreign enclaves of China’s big cities and normal cubicle skiving resumed.

In retrospect, three things stand out about the blocking of YouTube. The first is that it took so long. The second is that is was so brief. The third is how important YouTube has become as a cultural touchstone for the expats of China.

In the two years since YouTube erupted into the Internet’s global mainstream, its blocking in China has seemed the surest of sure bets. Scattered within its immense catalogue of clips are things that can make even the most decadent of Americans blanch, let alone conformity obsessed Chinese bureaucrats.

A cursory search returns clips that run the gamut of Chinese taboos, including incendiary material from the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations of 1989, introductions to the wonders of Falungong, and plenty of the Dalai Lama. And all of this is on top of a vast collection of garden-variety bad taste. Keyword filters catch some of this material, but plenty is openly available. Other video sharing services host worse, but YouTube’s dominance has rendered them all but irrelevant.

For a long time, YouTube’s saving graces appeared to be language and distance. Without a Chinese interface, and with a host of successful and relatively sanitized local competitors such as Tudou, YouQoo and 56.com occupying the attention of Chinese surfers, YouTube seemed to have escaped the inevitable.

When YouTube finally did go dark, dueling explanations immediately emerged. An AFP report suggested that it was the result of fresh clips of the Dalai Lama receiving a medal from President Bush, something that was also blamed for the brief hijacking in China of a few foreign search engine domains that occurred at the same time.

Slightly more credibly, Marc van der Chijs, one of the co-founders of Chinese video-sharing heavyweight Tudou, suggested the block was the result of the launch of YouTube’s Taiwanese service.

The cause is still debated, but in the end it seems most likely that YouTube was simply caught up in the broad media and Internet scrubbing that accompanied the 17th Communist Party Congress, which started October 15th, the day before the block.

No matter the reason, there was no mistaking the relief when YouTube was accessible again. “YouTube unblocked!” exclaimed Shanghaiist, one of the China blogging world’s English heavyweights, complete with the exclamation point.

That relief suggests something of the importance YouTube has assumed since its launch in the spring of 2005. A post on the situation on Danwei, the most authoritative blog on media in China, gathered 93 comments, an order of magnitude more than normal. Many of these were devoted to how to get around the block. One commenter, a teacher, went so far as to beg for someone to send him software to get around the block, explaining that it was the only way his students could “get access to what is going on outside China.”

Which may be exactly the point. For many, YouTube seems to have become an indispensable link to the world outside China. It’s not that newspapers, the rest of the web and satellite television have become irrelevant. It’s simply that web video is one of the most immediate and gratifying means of linking into the pop culture and current affairs mother lode.

It is perhaps dangerous to take the sentiments of blog readers as representative of broader expatriate attitudes toward YouTube. It’s also worrying that so much passion attaches itself to a medium that is largely entertainment kibble, and in which the “Numa Numa dance” counts as durable pop culture. But this is China, where the weight of expectations makes every development with the Internet resonate with extra importance.

In the end, the brief interruption was less a real trauma than a reminder both that the means of connection with the world outside the middle kingdom are evolving, and that some of the most essential of those connections remain available at the whim of callous bureaucracy.

Today, YouTube is once again taken for granted. But in the backs our minds we know we’ve been warned.