I'm back! But....

The expected resumption of blogging might be thwarted by those darned Kafka Boys.

The tsunami of popular revolts across the Middle East is making our Communist Party overlords here in China very, very nervous.

So far, the only emanation of any similar discontent here - the so-called 'Jasmine Revolution' - seems to have been confined to a handful of gatherings at McDonald's and Starbucks, and these have posed no threat at all to the fabric of society.

The authorities, however, are in a fair old panic that the dreaded free flow of information could lead to the same kind of shitstorm here that unseated that nice Mr Mubarak a few weeks back, so they have begun stomping all over the Internet.  As so often in the past, the thoroughness of the 'crackdown' may be in part fortuitous rather than directly targeted: they're applying so much filtering - at a time when user demand is especially high! - that the system (creakily slow, at the best of times) is being completely overwhelmed.  Many key overseas websites are proving unusable - even via robust proxies - not because they're being actively 'blocked', but simply because the network is so hopelessly overloaded that all high-traffic sites are continually getting timed out.  It hasn't been this bad since an ocean-floor earthquake just off Taiwan severed the trans-Pacific Internet link for a while three or four years ago.

And I rather fear that this situation could drag on for months this time.

I hope the CCP leadership will see sense on this.  Yes, the Internet may be a dangerous means of organising dissent; but it is also a very useful way of monitoring that dissent.  And, frankly, the number of people who are sufficiently pissed off with the regime here to even think about getting out on to the streets - or into the coffee shops! - to protest is far, far, far smaller (at least as a percentage of the total population - and that's what counts) here than in Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, etc.  And if discontent did exist on that scale, suppressing Internet communication wouldn't stifle it; it could spread by any number of other means, even by good old-fashioned word-of-mouth, direct person-to-person conversation.

Interfering with the Internet on this sort of scale is only serving to increase discontent (and to draw people's attention to the fact that there's something their government doesn't want them to know about or discuss).  It accomplishes nothing useful; it only makes things worse.