How about the New York Times for breakfast, NPR for lunch, Drudge for dinner, and CSPAN for a bedtime snack – just in time to hear the opening gavel in the House and Senate?

Just because I live in China doesn’t mean that I can’t still feed the political junkie within me. All of these news services – and more – are available to anyone in China who has a computer, or in my case, an Iphone.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter are still blocked in China.  Although, if I really want to spend hours and hours perusing my friends’ personal lives – finding out who is sleeping with who and who threw a pillow at me – I can use a special proxy to access these services.

More on that later.

But when it comes to news and information, the growing population of English speakers in China has a whole new world in front of them. A world relatively free of the heavy censorship that controls the Chinese media.

Let’s take the issue of the famous Tiananmen Square massacre as an example. Even 20 years later, this is supposedly one of the most sensitive political topics in China.

Open up Google.cn, Google’s search engine page in China, and enter in the words ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre 1989.’

In China, some of these first 10 results are not working or they redirect to a page that clearly shows that the content has been removed. However, even on the first page, there is enough information to whet someone’s appetite.

Take this webpage, for example, which states that “following the conflict, the government conducted widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press.”

This particular page may not give specific details about what happened on that fateful day, but the farther you move away from the first results page, the clearer the picture becomes.

Like on Page 4, where Google links to a blog entry containing an English article which refers to the events on that day as a ’slaughter’ and talks about people trying to outrun tanks in Beijing.

The real question is, how many people in China make it past the first page of search results?

And then there are proxies – a  server that allows internet users to browse sites that may be blocked by content filters

I had never even heard of using a proxy until I came to China.

The first person to introduce me to a proxy was a fellow teacher, in his twenties, who wanted to access the BBC – a website that was blocked when I first arrived in China.

Anyone in China who has the desire to access a blocked website can do it with relative ease – and for free. There are literally hundreds of services that can bypass the Chinese censors.

The key to all of this, as I have already alluded to, is the ability to read English.

The Chinese government may be very efficient at erasing politically harmful Chinese content off the web and out of reach of even proxies, but it has little control over English content that is posted in other countries.

Or even in its own country – where the best way to get away with writing about a politically sensitive topic is to post it in English.

In many ways, living under censorship is not mandatory in China. It is a choice.

I am always surprised by how few of my students or Chinese friends even bother to access the numerous international news services that are available uncensored in China.

“We like our own news,” a friend explained to me. “What else do we need?”

And that is exactly the kind of attitude that the Chinese government is betting on as millions in China learn the English language.

Even when other sources of information are waved in their faces, too many people in China will continue to run back to the government run media because they have been taught from an early age to have an unwavering trust in Beijing.

Thus English should be the greatest weapon against censorship in China but it is not.

Not yet, at least.

Not until the Chinese people really have the strong desire break through the censorship and seek alternative sources of information.

This past week, the China Daily website, the largest English portal in China, reported that “an online poll to solicit public opinion on a date for ‘national tourism day’ has received a staggering 4.2 billion votes.”

Staggering? How about impossible.

The entire population of China is only 1.3 billion people and as the newspaper points out, only 300 million people use the internet.

So unless there are another 4 billion people worldwide who really care about  how China celebrates  its proposed ‘National Tourism Day’, someone has figured out how to ’stuff’ the online ballot box.

As it turns out, the guilty parties may be two cities that are vying for the honor of having the date tied to an historical event of local significance.

Come on, people. It’s just a poll.

And you wonder why people say that democracy would not be an easy fit for China?

I will, however, confidently make a prediction about Google.cn.

It’s not going anywhere.

I know it, you know it, Google knows it, heck…the Chinese government even knows it. Which is exactly why  the news about Google’s threatened pullout has been censored here in China. Beijing knows it’s an empty threat and they want to act as if nothing happened when everything quiets down.

Ironic, isn’t it? The Chinese government is censoring the news that Google wants to stop censoring internet content in China.

Only in China.

I’ll address the censorship issue in a moment. But first things first.

Google accuses someone (or something) in China of having launched a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” in order to gain access to the email accounts of some prominent human right’s activists.

A charge that Beijing probably won’t even bother to deny. Not with a straight face, at least.

Google is understandably furious about these alleged cyber attacks but its threat to pull out of China rings hollow in my ears.

Whether Google.cn exists or not, hackers in China are still going to go about their business. They don’t need Google to be here. After all, Chinese hackers have successfully hacked all kinds of secure systems around the world, including the Pentagon’s not too long ago.

If anyone should be blamed for this attack, it should be Google itself for not doing a better job of protecting its user accounts.

This knee-jerk reaction by Google seems to be an attempt to take the focus of its own inadequacies. Instead of whining and crying about the attacks, maybe Google needs to take a closer look at how its cyber security is handled in China.

Which is exactly what Google is going to have to do because there is no way that it is going to to ditch China. Not after the millions it has invested here. And not after it considers the fact that China’s online population grew over 40% between 2008 and 2009 and continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

And then there is the censorship issue. Everybody loves Google this week as the company of  ’Do no evil’ announces that it will no longer be censoring Beijing deemed sensitive content on its Google.cn.

Google says it will over the next few weeks be “discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we would operate an unfiltered search engine within the law…”

And mark my words. Beijing will act as if it is willing to make concessions. Beijing will give Google more leeway to help ease the internet giant’s conscience.  And Google will come away looking as clean and pure as the driven snow.

But in the end, search engine or no search engine, Beijing still controls what websites are accessible here in China. It still has a finger on every little byte that enters China from other countries.

Every website ever created about the Dalai Lama and Tiananmen Square could be available on Google.cn tomorrow but still be blocked by Beijing.

In the end, we must remember that nothing can stop those in China who really want to know the truth. There are many ways to easily bypass the Great Firewall of China and access whatever you want to view.

While the issue of whether or not Google should censor content may be of great ideological importance in the West, it has little significance here.

Too many Chinese people know that what they are seeing on television or reading on the internet is a result of censorship. And they like it. Why? Because they trust their government implicitly.

And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

However, we have been hearing from some of our viewers that the Chinese government may be tightening its grip on some aspects of obtaining a work visa. We are hearing that:

1. It is much harder now to obtain a work visa from a public institution if you do not have a four-year bachelor’s degree. While a Bachelor’s degree has always been required by the government, teachers have often been able to get away with just having a TESOL certificate, especially if the institution really needed teachers.
2. In the past, public institutions were interested in hiring foreign teachers right out of college. This may be changing now as institutions are looking for teachers who have been out of University for at least 2 years and have some teaching experience.
3. Schools across the country are still able to hire teachers who are here in China on an L visa. We had been hearing earlier in the year that perhaps teachers were going to start being forced to leave the country first and then apply for a Z-visa but so far, it seems that this has not been enforced.

If you have any information about these three points or anything to add to our visa update, please leave us a comment below. As always, we welcome your stories and questions about obtaining visas in China.

All posts are moderated on this website so please wait patiently if your post does not show up right away.

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Enjoy English - Volume 2, Issue 9

ESL Story Title: The Loan

Summary: This week’s Enjoy English issue features a story about a girl who lent her brother some money and desperately needs him to pay her back.

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Enjoy English - Volume 2, Issue 8

ESL Story Title: The Hotshot

Summary: This week’s Enjoy English issue features a story about a guy who takes his brother’s Corvette out for a spin and things don’t go quite as planned

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Enjoy English - Volume 2, Issue 7

ESL Story Title: The Assignment

Summary: This week’s Enjoy English issue features a story about a girl who must decide whether or not she should give credit to a classmate who contributed nothing to a project.

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Enjoy English - Volume 2, Issue 6

ESL Story Title: The Plane Crash

Summary: This week’s Enjoy English issue features a story about two lucky survivors in the aftermath of a fiery plane crash.

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