The Great Firewall

Photo by MLDD.

Protest photos by “Tina” (she didn’t use her real name for fear of government reprisal).
 

Protest photos by “Tina” (she didn’t use her real name for fear of government reprisal).
 

n the morning of June 1, “there was only a small group marching,” a protester who wishes to remain anonymous reported to me, “but there were many people on the sidelines watching. The mood between the protesters and the police was tense at first, but once everyone realized that it was safe to march, many people joined in. By the afternoon, if you counted the marchers and the spectators, there were about 10,000 people there. The police force and the military were outnumbered. They tried to form lines to blockade the roads, but it was easy to go around them. Actually the police didn’t show much resistance because it looked like they secretly agreed with us.” My protestor friend showed me photos that he took of the march, and I could see that there were many kinds of people including lots of kids. “Overall, it was very peaceful because the people of Xiamen are really laid-back,” he told me. “There were police officers giving bottled water to the protesters, but the people refused, saying they would not drink water from the enemy.” He laughed when he told me that his friend who works for the Special Police (the Chinese equivalent of the FBI) told him a few days after the rally that he saw him at the protest and joked that he could get him arrested if he wanted to. In the end, the demonstration lasted two days without any major incidents. I asked if anyone got arrested and he said that he heard that a few of the major organizers were detained.



I was stuck at home trying to get an idea what was going on through my computer. If you are a foreigner and get caught at a public demonstration in China, you will immediately be deported and denied entry back into the country in the future, and I don’t want that to happen to me. During the protest, there were many people uploading photos of the event on the internet. On average, about five minutes after a photo had been posted, the entire site or page would be blocked by the internet police. Eventually people started putting photos on Flickr, which probably lasted the longest (approximately a day or two) before their page and account were inaccessible. On June 7, the entire Flickr site was blocked across most of China. Flickr posted a statement on their website that they “definitely care very much about our friends who cannot access pictures. We have been contacting people to hopefully get a positive resolution with restoration of photos,” but after doing a little research, it became clear to me that China is making a deal with Yahoo! to make a Flickr China, which means the government will have tighter control over users. Now there are rumors swirling around here that YouTube will be blocked and replaced with YouTube China in the near future. They’ve already got Google. Can MySpace and Facebook be far behind?

PAT PAT