The Great Firewall is a barrier not only to communication, but also to commerce and scholarship. “Our nation’s mind is caged,” an economics professor told Hannah Beech of Time last month. Without access to Google services and other online tools, research suffers. Fang Binxing himself, the “father” of the Great Firewall, regrets the ham-handed application of the Great Firewall, according to recent reports.
Cartoonist “Police Chief” (警长) critiques the plight of Chinese scholars, squeezed by “the Wall” as well as pressure from the Ministry of Education to keep “Western values” out of textbooks and classrooms. If Fang Binxing thinks “our technology has failed,” why not help scholars scale the wall?
Translation by Nick.
