George Adams claims that his stupid website is in favour of press freedom and against censorship. Except, it seems, when China blocks access to some blogs (in case you missed the story, Typepad blogs such as this one are currently blocked in China):
From QQ in Peking
China’s on-line community breathed a sigh of relief today as the communist government announced that it would block access to blogs published using the TypePad and blogs.com systems until further notice.“This is in line with president Hu Jintao’s ‘people first’ policy,” said a Xinhua spokeswoman, noting that the excruciatingly boring output of bloggers was deterring people from using the Internet, and adding that she only ever looked at NTSCMP.
Student Zhou Guo-an expressed her approval of the measure.“I love surfing the net to practice my English,” she said, “but I keep finding these terrible columns by really dull people, going on about their pets and their families, or cutting and pasting things I’ve already read in the newspapers and making childish comments about them. President Hu is a great man for protecting us from this tedious tide of trash,” adds Ms Zhou, who plans to become an advertising copywriter and has been reading NTSCMP since the 1990s.
A visit to the Great Wall Cyber Café, revealed that some dire blogs are still getting through. Within 10 minutes QQ encountered a bizarre piece by Big White Guy, expressing shock that a spastics association would use the word ‘spastics’. “ When you try to close the window,” said Mr Deng, the dwarfish, chain-smoking proprietor, “you have to expect some flies to still get in.”
Is it possible to be more idiotic than this? The other aspect of this is that George’s argument is that blogs are silly, pointless, things. True enough, of course, but most bloggers are honest enough to admit this rather than pretending that what they are doing is important and worthy, as George does with NTSCMP. However, there can be no argument that many blogs (particularly about and from China) contain informative and incisive commentary on what is happening in the PRC. Some of it is wrong and misguided, of course, but it is certainly constitiutes freedom of expression. Something that the government of the PRC and Mr George Adams obviously find unsettling.
Ordinary Gweilo 
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