From Danwei:
Those outside of China often imagine hordes of Internet savvy Chinese Web surfers scouring the Internet for cracks in the Great Firewall, avidly downloading precious snippets of information blocked by the government to disseminate among the circle of politically-aware Chinese cybernauts. The hope is that the Internet is having a transformative effect on China by allowing The Truth – or at least some essential truths – to seep into this tightly controlled information environment. And surely (the assumption goes) the vanguard in this process of “peaceful evolution” would be young, English-speaking urban professionals.
This image is largely a myth.
An anecdote can illustrate this: A few days ago I was at a multinational company in Beijing doing some translation work. I had just discovered a site called Proxzee.com, which is a rather useful tool (along with Anonymouse.org) for bypassing Chinese Internet blockage. There were about 20 young Chinese people in and out of the office throughout the day, some of whom were former students of mine, and I made a point of recommending Proxzee to most of them. I was interested – and bit disheartened – by the range of responses I got. Here are some representative samples, with my own rough categorizations: [Full Text]
