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A handy cheat sheet for interpreting the Google China story

Should Google have been in China? Did they make the right move in pulling out? Will this influence the Chinese government? What does it mean for foreign businesses in China? Are they evil or not? Who knows? Not me. And none of these questions are going to be answered in this post.

But stick with me, [...]

There's more to the Great Firewall than technology

Yesterday, in the US, former journalist, academic and blogger Rebecca MacKinnon gave testimony to the senate in a hearing called, “Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law.” A couple of days ago, she posted the written version of her testimony. It’s worth reading the whole thing, as it discusses several issues relevant to the [...]

A serious look at online censorship in China from an unlikely source

Among the circles that Imagethief runs in it is relatively fashionable to be completely disdainful of the Chinese English-language media. This is not entirely unfair. Chinese English-language news sources have their uses, but by comparison with most international news sources they can often seem amateurish and sloppy and they have a strange tendency to combine [...]

Clearing the fog around Google China reports

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

A quick pointer to an excellent post at the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog, which busts several myths concerning Google in China that have been widely repeated in the past few days, including those concerning the health of Google’s business [...]

Google detonates the China corporate communications script

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google’s bombshell blog post, which went up in the middle of the night early this morning our [...]

Seriously? They blocked IMDB?

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

Imagethief is as annoyed by the Great Firewall (or Net Nanny or what-have-you) as anyone who lives in China and uses overseas social networks. One of the great joys of my pox-afflicted Christmas vacation was having one of my annual bursts of [...]