A friend of mine was complaining about Dropbox being blocked in China and drop.io being bought up and deactivated by Facebook, leaving him no available large-file storage sites that he could use in China and America. After thinking for a minute, I sent him the following. Please note that when I say "China" it is a metonym for the Chinese government and Chinese business leaders, not the Chinese people, Chinese culture or Chinese tea, all of which are wonderful for many reasons.
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I just figured it out. I think that the government started blocking foreign sites like Facebook and Twitter with the stated intention of halting civil unrest, which most people here were able to swallow pretty easily. Those brown people are twittering scooters to blow up and facebooking mass stabbings with AIDS-infected needles. And Youtube hates China with their pro-Dalai Llama promoted content. What they're actually doing is creating a Chinese intranet where Chinese people only use Chinese products. Baidu will forever be ahead of Google here because that's where you can get free movies and mp3s if you want them. No need to block them, really. But who needs Youtube? Tudou has more locally-targeted content and everything has subtitles. Renren basically negates the usefulness of actual Facebook as everyone here has it. You can get news in English from the Global Times. Blogspot? Pfffft put that shit on a BBS. QQ will probably eventually displace MSN and Skype once it figures its stuff out.
