A momentary anxiety

We were without YouTube in China yesterday..... and we began to fear that the Kafka Boys were gearing up for another blanket censorship effort (as we suffered this time last year) in anticipation of the likelihood of renewed violence in Tibet.

But today things seem to be back to normal again, so perhaps it was just a glitch after all. (Curious thing: I wasn't in fact cut off from YouTube yesterday; I have two or three browser windows permanently open for the site, and they still seemed to be working fine. Only embedded video links seemed to be blocked. A similar thing happened a year or so ago when Blogger was briefly blocked; I found that so long as I kept my original browser window open I could still connect to the site and post to my blogs. I think this tends to argue against the suggestion that yesterday's blackout might have been down to a problem with YouTube itself. This sort of interruption of service does reek of cack-handed censorship.)

Or maybe the powers-that-be thought better of it; maybe they're finally starting to heed my advice.


Unfortunately, I very much doubt that. I fear the censorship regime will be ratcheted up again very shortly.

So..... let us make hay while the sun shines.

Here's a new game that's proven popular with young Tibetans during their recent New Year celebrations (a few weeks later than the Chinese one) - they call it 'Shoe Jintao'. [Hat tip to Stuart of Found In China for alerting me to this.]