Air China is planning to offer broadband internet service on international flights:
BEIJING, Feb. 12 (Xinhuanet) — Air China, the flagship international air carrier in China, and Connexion by Boeing, a business unit of the Boeing Company, announced a preliminary agreement they have reached to provide real-time, high-speed connectivity to air travelers traveling to and from China.
The announcement in Beijing included as many as 15 firm and optional retrofit installations on Air China’s Boeing 747-400 aircraft, and other long-haul aircraft models to be determined at a later date.
Aircraft installations are expected to begin in Oct. 2006 and, once completed, the Connexion by Boeing service will provide Air China passengers with in-flight access to the Internet, real-time email, instant messaging, corporate intranet access, including virtual private network capability, and the ability to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues while enroute to their destination.
It is unlikely that the firewall will be airborne. On top of the logistic problems of linking aircraft to China’s constrictive system of filters, AsiaPundit assumes international travelers will not appreciate the Great Firewall. Still, if an Air China plane operates a firewall-free flight, wouldn’t that be in violation of Chinese Internet regulations?
The third part of our business is the Licensing of our International Imagery on the Editorial side into China, in other words, News, Sports, Entertainment Imagery from all around the world being sold into China. That is done by an agent and that agent operates under the auspices of one of the organs of the Chinese, not government but related to the Chinese government. And as a result of that, they make sure, that agents that they do not pull foul at the authorities because we think that it’s very important to be very sensitive to what’s happening in that market. I mean at the end of the day what speaks most about the Chinese situation is that long-term, it’s going to be very big market for us, short-term it won’t be and it’s the only joint venture we had anywhere in the world and that’s the joint venture on the Creative side and that’s because of sensitivity to the local market and how things are going over there. So yeah we are investing in it and we are pretty confident but don’t expect China to significantly or radically move to get the images numbers in the next several years.
Google isn’t the first to put profit above principle in China. In 1994, Rupert Murdoch stopped broadcasting British Broadcasting Corp. programs on the News Corp. network in China after the government complained about coverage of the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. In 1998, News Corp.’s publishing house, HarperCollins, refused to publish a book by Christopher Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, that was critical of China.
Shanghai’s city administration has already enquired (about subscribing) and wants to use IPTV for its own community information network, Muhrer said.
We westerners seem to be conflicted in how we feel about China. We have an idealistic conviction that the simple flow of our ideas and culture and the relentless march of technology will somehow precipitate change, yet we can’t resist an interventionist desire to actively impose our values. At the same time we mythologize China into something unknowable and impenetrable. The result is that no matter what we do we risk patronizing the Chinese Internet users we want to help, and driving them further away.
AsiaPundit has been bothered by the shutdown of Michael Anti’s site, plus the complicity of Yahoo! in the jailing of 
Being a journalist in China is never simple. Some westerners dismiss all Chinese reporters as Xinhua lackeys and lickspittles, as cynical hacks in the pay of the Party, and the only time they are given any praise at all is usually after they have been arrested by the government and sanctified by Reporters sans frontieres. Such critics rarely take time to question how they would behave under similar working conditions. The prison system is littered with reporters who strayed too far from the Party line, and Running Dog is often astonished by the talent, tenacity and courage shown by many of our Chinese counterparts. Since last week’s sackings, several journalists were still submitting coruscating accounts of the fiasco to the Xici journalist forum, and even as the moderators were deleting the threads, the reporters continued to defy them and post their pieces anew.
