China's Internet Censor

I’ve been to England this summer, and (surprisingly?) Chinese was the nationality with which I interacted the most. The school was actually full of Chinese people, more than a half of the students(at least) were Chinese, and when I say a half I’m not exaggerating at all.


I have Facebook (and I thought: who doesn’t have Facebook? Almost everybody has a Facebook account!) I asked them if theyhad a Facebook account so they could add me! Some of their faces meant they didn’t understand me but to some of them the word “Facebook” rang a bell. Anyway, the ones who had heard about it told methat they hadn’t got it because it “wasn’t popular” and that everyone in China belonged to a social networking page called “QQ”. Some commented that they thought that in China Facebook was a bannedpage and some others assured me that they knew someone who had Facebook so it couldn’t be banned! The thing is that there were some Chinese who opened a Facebook account while in England, without knowingif they’d be able to get connected from China (but as I’ve written some lines above, some of them were convinced Facebook was allowed so “they’d get online” when they were back in China). Not tohave a nasty surprise, I decided to get myself a “QQ” account so I’d be sure to keep in touch with them when I was back home.

They went back to China and, as I had expected, Facebook was forbidden andthey couldn’t get into the page. A couple of days later, some of them could get in by downloading some software whose name I won’t mention here. Although some of them got registered in China, thewebpage wasn’t working very well, and most of them kept on using basically their beloved QQ. What I JUST CAN’T UNDERSTAND is that even though they know that their government has censored this page theythink they can’t use it only because it isn’t popular (as they said on many occasions!) I made some of them answer a questionnaire I’d prepared for my project and a Chinese girl wrote this down as a...