Censorship Works - should be the name of the department

I've come to Beijing as part of my MBA course and everything is wonderful, different, exotic, interesting, new and, well, what I like about travelling.

But we're also here to work. So I have the laptop plugged in to the internet through the hotel - a good four star hotel in the centre of Beijing.

And I thought 'I know, I'll update my blog'. Well, a good idea, but not easy to carry out. According to the internet from China, my blog, or indeed any blog at www.blogspot.com doesn't exist.

You can't find it.
No excuses.
No apologies.
No explanation.

You simply get a page that says the website doesn't exist. Now if I didn't know that my own blog existed, I might leave it at that. Fortunately, without being an übergeek I have geek tendencies and know that I can connect to the servers at my company through a VPN connection.

When I do that, I'm seeing the internet as if I was in London, not Beijing.

But most people aren't geeks, and much less übergeeks, and if faced with a page that says a particular website doesn't exist, will accept it and move on to another.

Another couple of websites that do not exist in Beijing?

Facebook, and Twitter.

It is an admirable system. Censorship is crude - they don't put a false page there, they simply say the page doesn't exist - but effective. Censorship works here. The only ones who can breach it are geeks and techies...not the majority of the population.

What would be fascinating to find out is how much 'dissent' there would be if people were to have access to completely uncensored internet. The US and the UK have, more or less, just that - barring a few websites promoting terrorist idealism - but are the people better informed about the world outside? Arguably no. But it would be an interesting research project to undertake - to see how informed people are about the general state of the world, and how much they bothered to change it, if they had access to all the information of the internet.

Is it possible, therefore, that China is using a hammer to crack an egg? Let the eggs become chicks and chickens and they will be obsessed with finding grain, growing, and laying eggs. They probably won't even notice that they're penned in and unlikely to survive the season.