Talk politics.

Something curious now. Last week rumours were spread around the Webs about the death of Jiang Zemin, the former president of China. Some media in Hong Kong started spreading the news and in response the Chinese government limited the capabilities for browsing this name on the Net. At the moment the Chinese search engine Baidu does not return results for that name.

Many Chinese blogs and other websites that mentioned the rumour were instantly brought down and access to all international sources mentioning the former president was restricted. A curious fact: in Chinese, Jiang sounds the same like the word they use for "river". So...simultaneously all searches for "river" in the Chinese webs were also severely diminished.

In the fight with state censorship the cyber-active Chinese have invented some special code words to refer to that-who-shall-not-be-named. Some jokes came out of those. For instance the Grass-Mud Horse, Cao Ni Ma, which sounds literally the same like a very juicy curse in Chinese [see very funny video]. It is no coincidence that this mythical creature which vaguely resembles a llama has become the symbol of the Chinese e-dissidents! =)

With such code names the internet activists are trying to bypass the technology that has become famous as the "The Great Firewall of China". It prevents the search on "sensitive" topics and names such as "democracy", "sex", and since last week, "Jiang Zemin" and also "river"...

Even some websites like Youtube are censored in China and are completely inaccessible from its territory. Just remember that in order to start working in China, Google signed an agreement with the Chinese government in 2006 to censor the results related to democracy, freedom of speech and some other topics that are too touchy for the sensitive Chinese ears. Like Tibet...

But of course the Chinese users are not dumb and they know what a proxy server is. And of course there are more elegant ways to go past this agreement, like the Google.com.hk server (obviously based in Hong Kong). Surely it requires some effort, because the Chinese government has responded by blocking the Google+ immediately after it was announced, as it did with Twitter and Facebook. If there is ever something remotely resembling a revolution there, they will do everything in their powers to prevent it from being tweeted.