From the archive.....T'internet

I wrote this one during my first few months in Shanghai, and then decided not to post it whilst I was still behind the firewall. I've just rediscovered it whilst sorting out some photos and decided it needed an airing, so here we go...

The internet. Oh the internet. Where do I start? It’s incredible how much we take our digital freedom for granted. Sure, you shouldn’t be ebaying at your desk, but apart from that there are very few rules and restrictions as to what you can and can’t do with the World Wide Web (take your minds out of the gutter, I’m not talking about THAT kind of stuff).

Not here. Some of you may have heard of The Great Firewall of China. Basically that means that websites you and I take for granted, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the BBC and even Google (google!!!) are blocked. You have to use Bing instead. Which, let’s face it, is rubbish. It’s like settling for a Folex watch or Mulbrery handbag. It also makes life massively difficult. Every website in the world uses Google translate. All website maps are Google maps. My personal email account is Gmail. Blocked. Blocked. Blocked.

So every expat I’ve met has a VPN (that’s Virtual Private Network, acronym fans). It means you can connect to a server somewhere outside of China and all your websites are accessible again. Sadly, not all of these VPNs work as certain people get wind of what everyone is doing and shuts them down every now and again. So far (touch wood) mine is working, which is how I’m managing to upload this (as Blogspot is owned by, guess who, Google). All the expats have their VPNs installed on their work computers too so they can work ‘normally’. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without mine. Being away is hard enough as it is, but being away and having no Facebook? I know that sounds silly but it’s the easiest way to feel connected to your friends and family, it’s a link to home that you just wouldn’t have otherwise.

Although Instagram and What’s App (both owned by FB) = not blocked.

But it’s not just the firewall issue. Internet here is slow in general. There’s no such thing as fibre-optic broadband and normal broadband is about as slow as AOL dial up used to be just without the screechy dialing tone noises. It makes watching and streaming things very difficult. In June, it got even slower and there was uproar. The official reason was because there’s 2 cables somewhere under the sea that serve broadband to China, and one of them got cut in half by the Japanese. I have no idea if this is true or not but it makes for a good story.

And then there’s Taobao. Taobao is like the ebay of China – you can buy anything on there. The issue is there isn’t an English version so it’s impossible to navigate. But it’s as omnipresent as ebay and Amazon are in the UK. There are companies you can hire that will negotiate Taobao for you, you tell them what you want and they’ll buy it on your behalf and deliver it to your house, which is hugely enterprising I thought. Or you can just ask a Chinese colleague to help you which is what most people here do. I haven’t attempted it yet, but apparently the salad cream dilemma can be solved as there is some for sale on Taobao!

Oh, and Chinese cinemas have a quota of foreign films they can show every year – it’s something like 37. Don’t think I’ll be catching a lot of movies here – although I didn’t at home anyway either (last thing I saw in the cinema was Titanic). (No, not in 1998, the 3-D version that came out in 2013.) And everything is pre-censored so there’s all sorts of stuff missing that might make sense to the plot. Apparently the only film last year that wasn’t censored was Insterstellar, and that’s because the censors couldn’t figure out what was going on long enough to know which parts to cut. That’s the rumour anyway.

Censorship. That’s one for another time.