GFW in The Atlantic

James Fallows has a new piece in The Atlantic about the Great Firewall, and is largely on target. I particularly like the analysis in the kicker:

It would be wrong to portray China as a tightly buttoned mind-control state. It is too wide-open in too many ways for that. “Most people in China feel freer than any Chinese people have been in the country’s history, ever,” a Chinese software engineer who earned a doctorate in the United States told me. “There has never been a space for any kind of discussion before, and the government is clever about continuing to expand space for anything that doesn’t threaten its survival.” But it would also be wrong to ignore the cumulative effect of topics people are not allowed to discuss.

It’s pretty tough to relate all the tech details in a literary magazine and I spent some time with Fallows in  Beijing Starbucks going over the nitty gritty. Hope to post the entire details sometime soon.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under China, Technology, GFW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.