Dragon Clawback: Adopt A Blog

A story told by a deeply frightened runaway Chinese diplomat to an Australian journalist about the Dragon’s claws casts an even more sinister dimension on the Great Firewall.

It brings home the grim reality that, be they oceans away on foreign lands, Chinese bloggers are never really beyond the reach of the dragon's claw. For under the same sky, anywhere else around the globe, the same dark clouds loom and in the same celestial heavens, the fearsome beast hovers menacingly. You can run but you can't hide. The mighty dragon can easily and viciously clawback as it has done with defectors and dissidents like the Falungong in Australia and probably anywhere else on this planet.

According to Issac Mao, one of China’s pioneer bloggers, more blogs have become inaccessible because of failure to register with the central government database. Even the clever Google Web Accelerator has crashed against the Great Firewall. The government has also loosed the Night Crawler to locate and block unregistered sites. Mao said that sheer logistics and high costs preclude the practicality of moving so many blogs out of the country. Inside China alone, there are 600,000 blogs.

The evangelizer of grassroots publishing in China has come up with the novel idea of Adopt A Chinese Blog for Chinese bloggers to circumvent the Great Firewall.

adoptablog

Via: Global Voices Online:

"It is based on the belief of free speech that we started the Adopt a Chinese blog project. We hope that we and others on the internet who shared the same belief, can share resources and help bloggers who want to freely express themselves and find a safer space for blogging, so that they can continue to blog without retribution."

"As a matter of fact, the goal of the program is to help bloggers. The support is not limited to any specific country. It is borderless and global. At least this is what we wish: let people freely express themselves, without the worries that their blog may one day be shutdown."

"If you’re interested in helping Chinese bloggers, write a post on your blog expressing your willingness to help and tag it as "adoptablog".

That will automatically enable Chinese bloggers to find you through this page.

Second only to the US, China has 94 million internet users (Morgan Stanley, 2004) who like us Malaysians, support the free flow of information and freedom of expression. In Blogosphere, we are all global citizens, yes?

So if you have a blog on your own server, please do adoptablog to help Chinese bloggers retain their ‘voice’ and freedom of expression. Who knows someday you might need find youself in similar need of adoption.