And on the downside: censorship

Well, since I've been pretty glowing in my praise for this place, I think it's important to highlight one rather startling way I've encountered Chinese censorship routinely: China's government blocks access to (most of or all of) Blogspot. Yup, that's right, I can't see my own blog (or anyone else's) by typing the URL into a browser in the regular way. The list of verbotten sites used to be longer (including, gasp, Google), but some are no longer censored. I'm not sure how sites are added to or removed from the list, and I wouldn't imagine it is well publicized, either.

Part of what is so surprising about this censorship is how ineffectual it is, and how easy it is to defeat. There are any number of what are called proxy servers out on the interweb that will act as a go-between. If you can get to the proxy server, and the proxy server can reach your intended destination, then viola, you can see your intended destination. (This kind of relaying is central to the technologies at the heart of the internet, which allow many paths to any source of information.) Google even has one, of a sort: their web toolkit. You can browse to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and type in a URL you'd like to visit and, badda-boom, badda-bing, you're viewing a stripped-down version of the page. (It's great for mobile phones or when your connection is slow. You can even have it omit images for you.) I've been using it a lot over here, including to keep up with my blog reading.

There is no doubt volumes to say about this censorship. (And those in glass houses...) Still, it is so incongruous with the rest of my experience here. I can only hope that as China's development continues, it promotes and results in more and more openness and freedom of information.