Is Your Site Banned in China

The excellent Weblog Tools Collection site drew my attention to the greatfirewallofchina.org tool. Tap in a site address and the applet determines whether your site has been censured, or censored even, by China. Thankfully, it seems Sciencetext.com has not yet been banned in the Far East. [As of jan 08, GFWoC seems to be offline]

But, why should you, as a US blogger, for instance, care about being banned in China? Well, there are myriad reasons, not least of which is the fact that if your site is blocked by the Great Firewall of China you are potentially being missed by almost a fifth of the 6.7 billion population of the world and that’s an awful lot of putative RSS subscribers not to mention Adsense clickers!

More than that, if your site is truly worrying to the Chinese authorities in some way, then it means that your message is probably not reaching its intended readership. To quote from the GFWoC site, “The Chinese are very resourceful in this. A site about popular movie stars may become a vehicle for discussing delicate political issues. Among Chinese nerds hacking systems are circulating that completely bypass censorship, but you must be knowledgeable enough to download these from non-blocked sites. And then there are weblogs that appear to discuss dogs but are in fact describing the political situation in China.” So, even if your important fluffy puppies site is being blocked, there may yet be a way to get round the wall. Check out the greatfirewallofchina.org FAQ for more information [looks like it's now offline].