The Internet is a DANGEROUS Thing...

Upon arriving in Beijing, I noticed that I could not access www.jessicaheinzelman.com -- it was blocked (or rather the blogspot address that it forwarded to was). The government has strict control over what is accessible and what is not. Perhaps the thought of access to blogs was too risky or blogspot had been used to launch a revolution in another county. In either case, it's on the list. (Luckily for all Chinese residents, they can access my blog via www.anonymouse.org, a remote server that allows the viewing of all sorts of contraband.)

Dave and I had been searching for days for an Internet cafe that had some sort of power behind their computers instead of just enough to juice up yahoo, gmail and other email programs. My camera's memory cards were filling up and the situation was getting desperate. We found our first one in Nanjing, but unfortunately did not have our passports on us. "Passports?" you ask. Why would we need passports to access the Internet?

Everyone needs to show ID before being assigned one of the multitude of stations. Most patrons are in here gaming - Halo-type fighting and strategy games - but with all sorts of content out there, one (government) can never be too careful.

In 2000 the government apparently shut down thousands of Internet cafes. Soon more informal stations began to pop up in salons, family businesses and other publicly accessible venues. The information super-highway would not be conquered so the answer was to reinstate the large-scale cafe format with strict rules and regulations and a tracking system -- Dave and I not only supplied our passport information to log on, but also had them scanned (including our Chinese visa page).

Long live China's Democracy! (Hope they're not watching)