The answer is: Nobody
Or at least Great Wall of China seems to think so. I came across this website today which tests whether your site / blog is blocked in China or not, thanks to their censorship. My first test was for Prime Minister’s Office, India, and surprisingly it came out positive, indicating that PM of India is indeed accessible in China 🙂
Then I started playing around with URLs, testing sites which I read daily to see if they were being blocked too. Funnily enough, I ran into quite a few sites that are blocked.
So it started with the Indiblog winner of the year, Greatbong, one of my favorite writers. I was surprised to see this:
Maybe Greatbong’s love for Mithunda prompted China to block him. Who knows. Or maybe his rants on Mamata did the trick. Either way, it seems strange that a mere blog should be blocked. Or maybe he is that popular… perhaps more than the PM himself eh? 🙂
I decided to query a few more urls – notably mine first. I was let off the block – apparently my site is not blocked. But some of the popular blogs are:
Amit Varma’s India Uncut:
And lastly the one that surprised me most was Patrix considering that he is relatively less popular than all the ones mentioned above:
The last result raised my doubts about the validity of this website as Desipundit seemed to be available. Sure enough they do mention in their disclaimer that due to “technical reasons” some sites may report as blocked, even though it may not be.
I re-ran the tests a couple of times – surprisingly, Desipundit and my own domain gave mixed results – at random tries both of the websites were available, and other times it said both URLs were blocked. However all the other results were consistent – they were blocked.
I am not surprised by this though. It is China after all. Though I would wait for Greatwallofchina.org to sort out their bugs. If you note on their homepage, they do list all the URLs that are blocked in China. Not surprisingly, the the Tianamen Square incident is blocked, but amusingly even facebook seems to be blocked!
Meanwhile Greatbong: Tsk! Tsk! No Chinese love for you.