To those of you who still visit The China Gate:

You may be wondering what happened. This is understandable. Please allow me to explain. Since a relatively short time after I posted my last essay on March 31, 2009, the Great Firewall Of China has been in full effect and access to The China Gate has been blocked. This has happened before, but this time, there were two major differences:

1. Access to Blogger, the server for my site, was also blocked, which prevented me from posting anything from within China.

2. Access to the proxy servers that I have used to get around this was blocked as well.

In the past, I have found that this censorship was usually quite capricious. One day, access might be denied and another it may not until things would eventually loosen up. But to this date, one year later, that hasn’t happened. I have theories about why this may be, and maybe I will share them with you later. But for now, I will refrain.

At some point during the last year, I became aware of software that I could purchase that would allow me to bypass this. For a long time, I chose not to. My primary reason for this was because, even with this access, one big chunk of my target audience – readers within China – would still not be able to get in; I thought that I’d wait it out, too.

Unfortunately, my feeling now is that this block isn’t going to be lifted any time soon. As a result, I got the software, which I used to post this. However, those in China without access to this sort of thing are still in the dark. In a much earlier essay, I wrote about censorship and how it really does work. My opinion on this has not changed. Over the past year, I’ve had essay ideas and started to write them down but then stopped when I remembered that I had nowhere that I wanted to put them. Part of this was due to a lack of motivation – there were places that I could have sent my essays – but I’m finding from firsthand experience that this, and alternative distractions, are what censorship really thrives on: Relax. Play video games. Check out some porn. Just don’t pay attention.

Over the next stretch of time, I may revisit some of those old essay ideas, try to put them into readable form, and then post them here. Some may seem chronologically out of place; if this is the case, I’ll put some sort of contextual explanation either immediately before or after the main body of the essay. If not, I’ll just post them as usual.

So, to those of you who have been kind enough and patient enough to stick around, I sincerely hope that whatever I post from here on out will be worth your long wait.

Sincerely,
Matt