AsiaPundit is enjoying the holiday today and was not going to blog. However, this keen tool – pointed out by Rebecca — is really fun to play with. You can search Google.cn and Google.com at the same time. From it, AsiaPundit discovered that Google.cn does not censor search results for "Hu Jintao is a wanker."

Click on the image for larger size. The search in both portals turn up 395 sites. AP was not too surprised that Google.cn hasn’t set its filters for British slang but he was a bit shocked that Michael Turton’s site showed up as the second-highest ranked result. Blogspot is blocked in China, so according to Google’s statement that it will remove ‘dead’ links, Michael’s site should not exist.
Could Google be fallible? Or does the party approve of the View from Taiwan? Is Michael actually a pro-CCP stooge?
We report, you decide!

(Updated below, click on "continue reading" )

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, google, northeast asia

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Via Matthew Stinson we learn of a bold project to help us China-based Internet users.:

If you are a Chinese user of Google who has received notice that your search has been censored, let us know. We will search Google from the United States and post the results here.

While the thought behind this is appreciated it simply is a dumb idea. For starters, while Google.cn censors results, users in China can still access Google.com. It is still possible do searches in simplified Chinese script on the US-based platform. I doubt many Chinese people will bother to e-mail a presumably English-speaking American requesting that he do a search for them when it is completely unnecessary.

Beyond that, if Google.com were ever to be blocked in China, users would not want to wait for a US-based person to conduct a search for them. There is a 12-hour time difference between Shanghai and New York. If a search needs to be done at 15:00 hours Shanghai time, would the US-based person care enough to get out of bed?

If people in the US want to help people in China and elsewhere access information, they can do as Matthew notes:

If someone here in China really needs to gain access to information, the way to help him/her isn’t by copying and pasting search results into a blog, it’s by helping them to use a proxy. If Stephen and others want to help, they should volunteer assistance to make a bilingual network of websites that offer web proxies– easier, faster, advertising-free versions of Anonymouse — for net bar use and downloadable, easy-to-configure proxy clients for home use.

Offer some bandwidth to TOR or JAP.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia