After stumbling across this news article, I felt that I had to write a post about freedom of information in China. The article is about a tiny ad that someone placed in a small newspaper in Sichuan commemorating the mothers of those who had died in Tiananmen on June 6 1989. It slipped past the censors, but as a result China fired three of the newspaper's editors.

Honestly, I am surprised at how paranoid China still is on controlling the flow of information. The Great Firewall of China is extremely annoying to me - since I've been here, China has started blocking blogspot, so I can't check my own blog (although I can log in through blogger.com and post still - I just can't look at my posts - or any comments people may have written). Wikipedia is also blogged - which is super irritating, because many of the best travel articles are written there, and it would make visiting cities much more convenient for me, and I would get more out of it. Google News is also blocked. So is the Asia-Pacific section of BBC.com. I'm actually surprised that I was able to load the article above. I am surprised that China is this paranoid, because I don't get a sense of a huge underswell of antigovernment discontent here - most people seem to generally agree with the government policies, and often tell me about the wonderful things that their government is doing.

It is possible that people really are super upset with the government and just aren't expressing it to me because I'm a foreigner. Or it's also possible that they are only satisfied with the government because of the control of information. Still, it strikes me as telling that China continues to control access to information the way it does today. Personally, I think controlling information the way that China does can cause more damage than good - it really ticks me off that I can't look up my sister-in-law Rixa's blog (I'm sure that there's lots the Commies have to fear in her blog). The page that comes up when you look up a blocked site is always the same - it claims that the website doesn't exist. But when China switches access to sites on and off (blogspot was ok for the first two weeks while I was here, but has since been blocked), then people know that it's been firewalled and it makes you ANGRY!!!!!!

Plus I hate the police in Zixi.