The Chinese government protects its citizens from pornographic and subversive content on the Internet with The Golden Shield Project. Dubbed The Great Firewall of China, this project employs $800 million in equipment and an estimated 30,000 censors monitoring all internet traffic within China and through the three main fiber optic lines to the outside world. With regard to websites, the firewall acts in two ways. Sites run by known enemies of the state or containing what the government deems dangerously subversive content are blocked explicitly. This explicit block prevents a browser from matching the name of a site (ex.: www.tomgrace.net) with its Internet IP address (ex.: 209.11.45.15)--the equivalent of blacking out a phone number in the white pages. Without the IP address, a browser cannot find a site and a 404 error appears on the screen. This site is not explicitly blocked in China, so feel free to look it up at a net cafe in Beijing or Shanghai. The Great Firewall also blocks sites by content, based on keywords or the body of text within the site. Using Google or Yahoo to search for "Tiananmen Square" will yield very different results in China than elsewhere in the world. This site may, or may not appear on a list of relevant sites depending on the keywords used to locate it. 

On the left is a list of links to various websites. The top link is to a Chinese translation of this page, as generated by Google.cn. The next five link to pages that are forbidden in China. While the Vatican's website is not blocked in China, the page containing Pope Benedict XVI's letter to Chinese Catholics is banned, and possession of this document in China is a crime. The next four sites are blocked because they address religious persecution in China, Tibetan independence, and the abuses of China's laogai prison system. If you try the forbidden links from this page at a computer outside of China, the sites will load as they should. If you were to access this page from inside China and tried the forbidden links, all would fail.

What I discovered this summer, with the help of some friends in China, is that the BETA Chinese language translator built into Google.cn bypasses the Great Firewall of China. So if you are feeling subversive, click on the top link and access this page in Chinese, then try the forbidden links from inside China.