It's good that in the end you clarified that "not using Google products" was a joke. I was wondering about how much Baidu had to pay you to to do just that. :-)

An interesting discussion, especially to me about the Internet dissidents vs. main stream users in China -- helps to keep me in balance. A lot of the bits and pieces that I have been following really depress me.

What do you guys think about the calculations that the authorities delete 96% (if I remember it right) of blog postings in the Chinese Internet based on the figures published in the White Paper? They sound half joking but the numbers are kind of revealing. Aren't they?

What is the name of the song and artist that played at the beginning?

@chinafacing,

We edited some extra material into the podcast and must have forgotten to extend the closing music sequence, which is why things would have been out of whack. I've just fixed the problem and reuploaded the audio.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, it was definitely not intentional!

--dave

@chrish0204 - The artist is Chunqiu (春秋, Spring & Autumn), which is my (Kaiser's) band. The song is called 猎人, The Huntsman, and it's available with the other eight songs on our first album on iTunes. Hopefully you're asking because you like it!

@Ma_bole - If you're asking whether I'd leave if all access to Internet sites hosted outside of the US were cut off, probably, unless I had good reason to believe that it was only temporary. Personally I think your dates for info control paranoia are a bit off; things were actually quite good in 2006 and 2007, and only really started getting horrifically bleak in 2008. Some would argue that it was a confluence of sensitive dates and unforeseen events like the riots in Lhasa in March 2008 and in Urumqi in July 2009, but I don't think they're likely to go back to how things were in late 2007 when nothing besides the usual suspects, plus a couple of blog hosting sites, were blocked.

What matters much more -- not, perhaps, to me personally but to me as a matter of principle -- is the level of censorship on domestic Chinese Internet sites, as that censorship impacts a great many more people than GFW censorship does.

My sense is that this "arms race" will continue to play out over the next few years at least with no clear "winner." The political potency of netizens will continue to expand irrespective of Beijing's efforts, in part because that potency is something that can be quite useful to the Party; and at the same time, Beijing will redouble its efforts to control, through technology, through policy, through active engagement, and through many other means, the power of the Internet.

@Stinky Tofu - Yes, I think that was an oversight, and you're right, one of us should have brought it up. It's almost certainly a factor in the timing of this, as the Google affair really brought the issue to the forefront of discussion for so many people both within and outside of China. My bad! Thanks for bringing it up!

And I've seen the Antonioni doc and the amazing c-section segment. I've seen other such surgeries performed with conscious patients under only acupuncture as anesthetic, too. No doubt in my mind that there are aspects of acupuncture with genuine, provable efficacy. Whether that means that the entire system of meridian lines is actually valid, or whether any of the explanations offered by practitioners of acupuncture are true, is another matter entirely.

@hong, @ma_bole,

If it became impossible to access the overseas Internet, we would be forced to relocate to Hong Kong very quickly. We aren't funded by the Chinese government (or any other government for that matter) so losing international connectivity would be a major problem. That said, my personal reading of this white paper is that it may simply be an attempt to assert non-military institutional control over Internet regulation, which would be a good thing.

My main personal reaction to the increased controls has probably been more openly acerbic comments to party members when they struggle to open links to Google docs I've unthinkingly sent them. I think the image most patriotic Chinese hold is still one of a victim mentality vis-a-vis the west though, and that as long as there is the perception that the people and organizations hurt are mostly western companies (like Google), no-one will care about any restrictions and some people will even take satisfaction in them.

As Kaiser says though, how this affects domestic Internet users is a bigger question and one that doesn't play easily into nationalism. And I don't know if this white paper or more recent blocking efforts are even relevant here. Most of the policies that seem to be hurting Internet users in China are business, tax and license related decisions coming out of the Ministries of Information, Culture and Commerce. And those decisions seem as much about rent-seeking as anything else.

$0.02,

--david