For example, when you surf the web from a hotel in Dubai, you may Flickr also. Regular people may not.

You may be right about the hotels, I don’t have enough experience of hotels in China to comment.

I agree that even though many Westerners criticize the Chinese government – and there are many inequalities and problems in Chinese society – they have made some impressive achievements, most notably lifting a lot of people out of poverty.

Censorship of Internet and media in China is an issue for foreigners and a small segment of well-off, open minded Chinese. It means very little to the average guy in the street who is more concerned with economic issues, unless censorship refers to there being a coverup of an injustice or corruption at the local or provincial level.

I have been told that somehow they don´t censor hotels in which mostly foreigners stay like mine. Maybe that explains why I am not able to experience censorship. In any case my view is that even from the government point of view I cannot see how blunt censorship may work. American and European governments have found ways to give incentives and disincentives to large media companies that unfortunately produce even better results than the crude methods of the Chinese governments. In any case the best way to get good press is having a good story to tell. And this country having lifted 400 million people out of poverty has a good story to tell. At least a one third of the way good story to tell.

Regards,

My son has spent the past three summers in China and we’ve used Skype, but there are occasionally problems – notably with his Chinese sim card, which he sees as one of the great benefits of being there! Easy to buy, cheap and easy to use. He’ll be traveling through China this summer, has a blog about it and we’re trying to find sane methods for posting to his blog from remote corners of Anhui Province, for example. Interesting challenge.

Looks cold in Beijing, judging by your photos.

I also think that this Surveillance Directive is quite relevant for your FON project. For example, you need to decide who is supposed to store the logfiles (the FON mothership or individual Foneros) and if you want to enable anonymous prepaid access or not.

Especially the latter question will be crucial for getting a large boost of support for the FON project from the over 50.000 European opponents of the Surveillance Directive.

Another example of censorship: I just read that AOL is filtering any e-mail that links to DearAOL.com where there is an open letter to the company asking them not to charge for “certified email delivery”.

Thanks

While there is definitely censorship in China people who are resourceful can quite easily find a way around it to get the information that they want. Personally I haven’t been able to access Wikipedia for the last few months and sometimes CNN goes blank when there is a story on China – probably when something critical is being said.

The Chinese have done a good job of mastering the art of propaganda, for example state owned TV will happily provide coverage of riots and democracy protests in other countries giving the impression of openness but will project in a very different light, or more usually not cover at all, similar events in China.

However in many ways China is a much more open society than some western coutries, especially for us foreigners for whom many of the local rules don’t seem to apply.