Xinjiang opens up Internet access … to 30 websites
China’s Xinjiang province has been without Internet access since anti-government riots last summer. At the end of 2009, the government began allowing access to a handful of government-run sites. This week the bans were lifted on a whopping 27 websites. Josh, of the Far West China blog, who against all odds is blogging from Xinjiang, ...
China's Xinjiang province has been without Internet access since anti-government riots last summer. At the end of 2009, the government began allowing access to a handful of government-run sites. This week the bans were lifted on a whopping 27 websites.
China’s Xinjiang province has been without Internet access since anti-government riots last summer. At the end of 2009, the government began allowing access to a handful of government-run sites. This week the bans were lifted on a whopping 27 websites.
Josh, of the Far West China blog, who against all odds is blogging from Xinjiang, has a theory about the government’s strategy:
You might be getting tired of counting new sites being opened in Xinjiang as “news”. I know I am. If, however, you’re waiting for a single day when Xinjiang will suddenly “turn on the internet”, I have some bad news for you.
I believe China is strategically opening small parts of the internet and making headline news out of each event knowing full-well that the international media’s attention span won’t keep up. We’re already getting bored. 27 more sites are opened in Xinjiang today, 50 more next week…who cares?
Meanwhile the flow of information is being strictly controlled and authorities still take the opportunity to declare a state of freedom on the internet.
Right now the difference between internet in Xinjiang and the rest of China is determined by the way we describe the censorship. Throughout most of China people explain the Great Firewall by the number of sites which have been blocked; in Xinjiang we count how many sites have been unblocked. That’s a huge difference.
(Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman)
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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