Firewall THIS

I get this message a lot. Not as often as I would if I did my web-surfing in Hanzi, but frequently enough to have me punching the wall in extremely disharmonious frustration.

That message pops up--along with a maddening, triangular, exclamation-pointed hazard sign--every time I try to load a website that's been ix-nayed by China's "Net Nanny." I imagine this imposing entity personified by a group of censors huddled over fancy, interweb-intercepting computers, analyzing site addresses and page contents and determining whether they're kosher enough to merit a CCP stamp of approval, or if some seemingly arbitrary rubrick has judged them too incendiary for Chinese browsers.

I say "seemingly arbitrary" because I have trouble figuring out what kind of criteria, exactly, are used to figure out what's allowed through and what isn't:

All Wordpress-hosted sites, including the Maclean's website, are blocked. But Blogspot, evidently, is not.

Thankfully for my sanity, globeandmail.com is kosher. So is nytimes.com, apart from a few days ago when it latter was blocked and then mysteriously restored, eliciting some interesting theories as to why it was firewalled in the first place. But articles about the Dalai Lama take a suspiciously long time to load. BBC is fine in English, but not the 中文 version.

I get search results but can't open anything when I Google Tibetan or Uighur independence. Most Tian'anmen "incident" articles open, just fine, but the image results I get are drastically different when I use Google.cn. Having once done an image search on Hu Jintao (don't ask why that was necessary at the time), I found to my consternation none of the photos that showed up would open.

I know, I don't get it, either--his photo's everywhere.

The creepiest thing, though, is that when I Google something problematic, I find other, normally kosher sites--usually those belonging to major news sources--take an awfully long time to load, and my browser's propensity to freeze rises suspiciously.

Weird.

But the Net Nanny's incessant naggings don't render China's active "netizen" community any less powerful. Quite the contrary: The blogging, QQ-ing community is extremely vocal and active--in expressing opinions, co-ordinating charity events and, most notably, in enacting "human-flesh search engines."

Apart from being a really fabulous name for a band, human flesh (renrou) search engines are part of a vigilante, netizen-driven movement that conducts mass witch hunts aimed at exposing and tormenting no-goodniks--anyone from corrupt officials to frauds, kitten-killers and philandering husbands. The alleged perps find their personal information posted online, making them the targets of a shaming campaign that picks up where what it sees as a grossly inadequate (or nonexistent) official justice system leaves off.

Renrou search engines made the news most recently when a website and individual were ordered to pay compensation in China's first online harassment case. If nothing else, the searches' prevalence indicates the profound power the Web offers Chinese citizenry. In a way it justifies Beijing's censorship-inducing paranoia. But it also makes it patently obvious that censorship is fighting a losing battle to keep mainland China in a harmonious, ignorant bubble.