Blog readers of the world: Be content! Why? Because you can read all the blogs you desire!
Bloggers from Xiamen, China – like my friend Tina and I – are happy to post blog entries for you to enjoy (as long as we can guess the menus in mandarin), but guess what… we cannot read them ourselves!
It is said that blogs had been used to organize protests and that consequently, the authorities have blocked them all. We are not sure if it is only in Xiamen or all over mainland China. (Radio-Canada news Home Page is also blocked, but I can visit CNN.com… go figure!).
So, here are a few tricks for bloggers to go around this unpleasant surprise. (It would not be fun if we didn’t try to go around what authorities are trying to impose, right?).
Trick number 1 (I am pretty sure it works from what I observed online): put your blog within your website if you have one… then it will lose this noticeable “Blogspot” URL, and everyone will be able to read you.
Trick number 2: view the blogs through a VPN – you know, a company network – That is what we do ourselves to read ex-pat blogs from China. It is slow but it works.
Trick number 3: go to Hong-Kong for a weekend (we need to exit China every 30 days anyway with our visas) and enjoy all the blogs in the world then! Read away for the whole weekend!
Trick number 4: if you are planning to move to China, and are looking for all those valuable tips and pearls you can find in blogs (and nowhere else), don’t wait to get here to read them, it will be too late. Read them before you come!
And to all of you out there, start enjoying reading those blogs as if they were forbidden fruits, because they may be…