Things to love about China: 17 of 100

The Internet

The internet in Kazakhstan isn’t as slow as one would think for a

post-soviet country. I can watch YouTube videos and even stream TV

shows. I can download all the movies in the world and I will never get

a letter from my cable company or from the MPAA. There are, however,

downsides to the system.

The real sucker-punch is that you only get a finite amount of

downloaded information before you reach your limit. Once you reach

that limit, you are S.O.L until the next month. Sometimes it is the

last few days in the month in which my internet gives out. Sometimes

it is only after a couple weeks. I can limit the amount that I

download, but I never know how much I have used or how much I have

left.

So will China be better? Absolutely! Hong Kong has the 2rd fastest

internet in the world. You can download as much as you want, as fast

as you want. The speeds are much faster than in the States and you can

download anything without getting in trouble.

“Hey wait a minute,” you say, “China has almost every website blocked

including Wikipedia.” Well, the answer to that is yes… and no.

Yes, China does block a lot of websites.

No, it is not hard to get around them.

One Chinese citizen informed me, “The blocking is pointless. Every

elementary school child knows how to use a proxy-server. It is so easy

to do.” I guess the ‘Great Firewall of China’ is not so great after

all.

My friends in China are very impressed by the internet in their homes as well as the accessibility in restaurants and most public places.

There are more Chinese internet users than any where else in the world and that number is growing. Will the Chinese government continue to try and block the net to their peoples? With what is happening is Egypt, it will probably continue for now. But China is the future and I foresee a time when China will become the internet.