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The Net as Seen in China by Nino Ivanov
On the evening of 5th July 2020,curiosity
got the better part of me and I decided to fulfill
a dream of mine: to see the Internet the way the
Chinese see it.

Before you,dear reader,do anything
unwise, let me urge you: if you reproduce this
experiment, then do it from a virtual machine or
a live CD.Yes, there were “countermeasures,”
though I cannot exactly say of what kind.

I was considering doing this time and again,
but what I usually saw was advice like this:
Get a VPN and exit in China; turn off Google,
BBC, Wikipedia, and Facebook in your /etc/
hosts; and the like,most of which has been
more jocose than seriously considered.

Essentially,everybody thought, including
myself, “I will go there and play a happy game
of cat and mouse where I will seek things, and
Baidu (their most popular search engine) will
give me no results. When I type ‘Tiananmen
Square massacre,’ I shall find nothing.” The
truth proved more interesting.

My first attempts had been with a VPN. I
chose an exit in Beijing and... after two minutes,
I had seen they changed it to Hong Kong. And
from then on, it was practically impossible
for me to get to Beijing. I understand why


because they likely would have to justify before
authorities what, exactly, their exit node there
was up to. So if I was the “curious” type, they
would simply “eject” me.

My other attempt was a proxy configuration
in Firefox. You will find many “fake” proxies:
either ones which show you nothing, which is
unrealistic (they do have a net, of course), or
ones which show you everything, and which
seemed to me either entirely fake, or perhaps
they were local “escape routes.” But I wanted one
which would show me gov.cn and would not
show me google.com. At last, on https://
➥premproxy.com/socks-by-country/

➥China-01.htm, I found a SOCKS5 proxy,
202.107.233.123:3010, which worked.
First, I tried Google, just for the fun of it.
Nothing. And when I mean nothing, it is not
a “blocked” sign, as Germany, Austria, or the

U.K. give you when they block a torrent site, but
rather it is as if the site does not even exist.
Then I tried Yandex. That was interesting:
yandex.ru should normally show you a
search field, but instead it showed a login mask
with no search opportunity. Yet, it also showed
in the URL, /auth/?origin=china - so I
knew “I had properly arrived.”


At last, I resorted to Baidu and, of course,
searched for “Tiananmen Square massacre” (I
did this all in English, knowing no Chinese),
even insisting at some point with “massacre” in
quotes. Indeed, that was properly “cleansed.”
You get a lot of historic information, including
about events of 80 years ago, but you do not
see a word of “that which everybody knows.”

One article, however, stood out: “What’s
wrong with our liberal studies courses?” under

https://www.chinadailyhk.com/
➥articles/166/123/116/1562602958531

➥.html. What was interesting about it was
that it mentioned a few things - according to
hardcore party line, of course, but still. It told
you not to mess with the “black police” - which
obviously means such exists. And it told that
“students were evacuated from the Tiananmen
Square peacefully” which is perfectly
ludicrous, because, you know, why would you
“evacuate” someone from somewhere if...
“nothing ever happened?” What this article
taught me was that if you are Chinese, you
actually see some information, but if you want
to actually understand things, you will have
to “see through the propaganda.” This article
namely said that there was a disturbance on
the Tiananmen Square and that there is special
attention of the authorities to that issue.
The results were still interesting: the
Chinese by far do not get “no result at all,” as
I naively assumed. They get results, but results
which, if anything, are apt to distract the
reader and, lest the reader be careless, advance
official positions.

I proceeded to try various sites, imagining
myself as an avid Chinese youngster curious
for information. I was about to learn an
interesting lesson.

I tried Wikipedia - nothing, no site.

I tried “Black Lives Matter” - now, it was
full of BLM links, and I actually can easily
understand why: “look at the American
unruly society, they have racism and they lack
discipline” was the immediate thought I had
at the sea of links that stretched before me,
imagining to be a censor. From a propaganda
point of view, the clashes in the U.S. - no
matter the cause or the arguments -are surely
nothing to keep from the Chinese public.

Will they keep major historical events secret?
I Googled whether the Americans landed on
the moon, and it is full of links, including the
Indian confirmation with photographs of the

Page 56

landing site. So China does willingly allow its
citizens to inform themselves of major events
that are hard to keep secret.

Could I get “simple, but important”
information? Like the European Union’s main
page? Oh, I could. And that is not unrisky,
because the E.U. does have some Chinacritical
legislation in its legal archives. I admit,
I did not check these, though.

At that point, I harbored a funny belief that
when you reached a site, you could navigate the
entire site. That later turned out not to be true. I
had no Google Translate, obviously, so I turned
to Babelfish. It worked! I wanted to translate
from English to Chinese “Corruption in
China” - and, promptly, Babelfish disappeared.
As if the site had not existed.

Then I “accepted the challenge” and went
looking for a VPN. I knew these were forbidden

-but were they attainable? And this is where I
got an important lesson: you can actually seek
“VPN” in Baidu, and it will return a lot, a lot
of results. (This was not like in the Tiananmen
Square massacre case, where there were no
links or just irrelevant links!) But when you
tried to open the VPN links in new tabs, nearly
all of them failed to actually open. Only some
iVPN, StrongVPN, VPN.ie, and VPN Pioneer
sites got through. I do believe they do their
very best to block them all, but some are likely
too unusual and some are too new. What was
funny is that some “list of VPN providers”
actually got through, and there I got a lot of
links that Baidu itself would not indicate. So
finding a list of links might be your first step in
breaking out of the “search cage.”
Regarding news, I immediately supposed
that English news would be harder, so I first
tried news in Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria.
A lot of the main newspapers were blocked. But
particularly the “yellow press” got a chance
(like trud.bg), and in Austria, it was funny
that the more “right-wing” newspaper -Die
Presse - was accessible, whereas the more “leftwing”
-Der Standard - was not. Interestingly,
the official site of the state television (ORF.at)
was accessible. And because Die Presse had
their own search function, I could actually find
critical reports about the mistreatment of the
Uighurs. Sites like focus.de, which rely on
Google Custom Search for their results, could
not show results.

Very interesting was spiegel.de: for the
first time, I saw a sort of “skeletal” site, garbled


and text-only. Apparently, the site had been
somehow “processed” - you get a sight as the
browser’s links and lynx would offer you, but
still, it is there. This clearly looked to me more
like a “recreation” of the site, reconstructed
after deconstruction and analysis, rather than
a version of the original site. What initially
surprised me was the “trust”: that a site was
not, in case of doubt, censored, but rather
“carefully scrubbed.”

Then I turned to the English-speaking world.
American sites you can practically all forget,
and the same went for the English sites. I saw
two sorts of censorship: the “this site does not
even exist” type, which was true for anything
with the BBC, and the “Baidu shows you the
links, but you cannot click them” type, which
was true for The Sun or CNN. Some headline
aggregators (like http://www.newsdump.

➥co.uk/) did get through, though, and you
could see in these bits and pieces of “what the
West was talking about” and “that you shall
never see.” I assumed, if U.S. and U.K. failed,
then so would Canada, and, as Australia (and
by extension New Zealand) have disputes with
China, I assumed them to be excluded a priori,
too. So I went for... South Africa... and I saw
that most media was inaccessible there, too,
and way worse than the German-speaking
world! That was enlightening. So if you were
to search in English, you would have the most
restrictions (apart from Chinese, which I
cannot judge), not matter the country.
Some sites worked, however, but here, the
selective search function was interesting:
Seeking for China here: https://

➥
southafri catrib une.
➥com/?s=china actually works; but
looking for Uighurs is totally blocked:
https://southafricatribune.
➥com/?s=uighurs

Here, “something happened.” Suddenly,
Firefox went to 100 percent CPU activity,
including when I closed all new Chinese tabs.
I had to pkill it and restart. I am not sure if
this was a premeditated countermeasure or
some general mess-up, but yes, “that guy who
cared that much about the Uighurs and the
Tiananmen Square massacre better reconsider
his activities.” Maybe I’m paranoid, but that
was my thought. On with the show....

The English press, particularly including
the yellow press, was censored, but I was still
determined to get my “British News” - and

there they were indeed: http://british


➥news.com, with a laaaarge Union Jack on
top, because you know, a Union Jack makes the
whole thing super trustworthy.
This was all getting ridiculous. I decided
I should try “site:co.uk” in Baidu, and boom,
it worked! Baidu actually uses Google search
mnemonics! This level of copying was
ridiculous! I actually got https://www.

➥telegraph.co.uk/news/uk/. Uighur
time, right? Like it worked in Austria’s Die
Presse?
Wrong. There is no such website with search
function.

“Alright, Baidu”, I thought, and tried:
china site:telegraph.co.uk (yeah,
Baidu, that is what you get for plagiarizing
Google search mnemonics). This worked. I
don’t need to repeat my mistake of the South
Africa Tribune - I do not need to search for
Uighurs. China is sensitive enough!

And then the real fun ensued: https://

➥www.telegraph.co.uk/china/ was,
indeed, accessible - but as a skeletal site,
the same scrubbed, unpleasant-to-use-andmotivating-
you-to-navigate-away style as I had
seen in spiegel.de. Haaa, there was the
juicy stuff!
I click: “Letters: China has gradually
become the greatest threat now facing the
world”, https://www.telegraph.
➥co.uk/opinion/2020/07/02/
➥letters-china-has-gradually➥
become-greatest-threat-now➥
facing/

Poof! “Such a site has never been heard of,
my friend.”

OK, how about:

“Hong Kong’s security law is a global
problem”, https://www.telegraph.
➥co.uk/politics/2020/07/03/
➥hong-kongs-security-law➥
global-problem/

Poof! Nothing.
I returned to https://www.telegraph.

➥co.uk/china/. Poof! Nothing! Now not
even the scrubbed site was visible anymore!
OK, I tried again just https://www.

➥telegraph.co.uk. Worked. I tried some
irrelevant story about some British athlete.
Poof, nothing again! I returned to the main
page aaaaand... https://www.telegraph.
➥co.ukitself was gone. “No such site.”
That was an excellent demonstration of how

their “progressive blocking” apparently works.
What conclusions can we draw from this?

I. -The basis of the censorship is apparently
“ideological” and not “technical.” Information
is by no means “completely inaccessible,” but
the progressive blocking and the “showing
of links in Baidu which do not open” sort of
“let you feel observed and controlled,” that
someone might hold you accountable and
ask questions on what and why you were
searching. That some sites are “skeletal,” but
conditionally accessible, yet if you strain their
patience, these sites will vanish in front of
your eyes, like The Telegraph. At first, I was
thinking that Baidu was just being extremely
sloppy in showing me what links there were
that I would never access. After all, that was
proof that I was being censored, was it not?
But the Chinese authorities are not stupid at
all. You could argue, they actually want it that
way: you shall know about the censorship yes,
you indeed are being censored, and you
yourself should decide. Should you click on a
link or not, should a responsible citizen do this
or not? This is the main difference from the
naive “cat and mouse game.” Baidu does not
indicate to you which links actually work and
which do not, and how often do you think you
can click before “having a little chat about your
hobbies?” So the real censorship, in my eyes, is
not of “technical nature,” as I assumed naively
at the onset. Instead, it is a promotion of selfcensorship,
which is a lot more interesting and
effective and, with enough material available
to get you into trouble if you seek trouble: are
you, in your own eyes, a properly trustworthy
and compliant individual or will you attempt
to subvert the state laws?

II. - Technically, there seem to be three
categories of ex ante censorship: (i) absolute
censorship, like for the BBC or the Tiananmen
Square massacre - no links, no nothing; (ii)
relative censorship - you see the links, but when
you click them, the site does not load (but you
expose yourself, because you did click); and
(iii) “skeletal” sites, scrubbed reconstructions
of what they deem dangerous. Apart from
these, there seems to be ex post censorship,
where previously granted access may be later
revoked for a site in general. There is no “deep
analysis” of the site you visit, the analysis is
apparently rather ongoing - which links you
click.
III. - You can use Baidu’s Google-like
mnemonics to search within a newspaper for
“China” - this seems typically allowed.
IV. -The system has issues with
morphologically variant-rich languages like
German (like English transforms “go” to
“went” - German does it all the time) and
“unusual” languages, like my native Bulgarian.
V. - You will need to learn to “read between
the lines” a lot better than in the West - and
they will serve you many facts “right there.”
Needless to say, in the end I was all too
happy to turn this proxy off.

我當年讀到中七,唔係做IT的,只係科網年代入過IT公司做...