Chinese Internet Firewall

Chinese internet firewall check list

The Chinese authority manage the contents of internet; websites, social media, APP, etc., in China. This is often called the Great Chinese Firewall by the overseas press and businesses.

Many of Chinese internet rules and regulation protect the users and consumers.

While there are many views of weather this is a good or bad thing we recommend if wish to do business with another part of the world you need to respect local rules and regulations.

Generally, these are the areas not available in China

• Political commits - some political commits are not allowed. This not as regulated as in the pass. Increasingly Chinese social media is used for news information and not overseas internet content. Most international news is available in China but not read
• Social Media - most of the international social media is blocked in China. The exception to this is LinkedIn which is business social media.
• Pornographic - not allow on the internet in China.
• Google - Most products and services from Google while not blocked they are so slow to access in makes them unusable.

In the business world, which Access to China focuses on, the restrictions on overseas Social Media and Google can slow /stop your internet contents from being seen.

Overseas internet content is blocked by IP address. While this allows for to control access to specific internet content it does allow control of contents within an internet page. Therefore, Social Media site are blocked full.

In the case of overseas Social Media most is not accessible from China.

These at the time of writing are examples of international social media accessible / not accessible from China in changes from time to time.

Another example is where a Social Media is not accessible in China but there is replacement like product available.

While YouTube is not available in China. There is many “like” services available in China. The biggest of which is YouKu. In this example you can take your business videos and load them to YouKu.

YouKu is like YouTube with advents often interrupting the screening of your video.

In business, YouTube / YouKu while a quick method of loading a video, embedding the video inside your internet content will require more work normally but will gives better results.

This is example of where the Chinese "Like" product is better than the oversea products due to local performance issues in mainland China.

Dropbox is available in mainland China. The download speed of the data from Dropbox is very slow in China. The better solution is Baidu Pan, which is now part of Baidu Cloud services.

While the loading of the data be Baidu Pan maybe be slower from outside China, the access speed in China is fast.

In China while many of the overseas Social Media not available there are many local Chinese replacements.

This bring me to the last and most important group of services not available in China: internet contents / tools services supplied by Google.

Above are examples of Google not available in China. This statement is technical not correct. Google services are available in China but they are slow down to response time of minutes. This results in internet content using Google service take 5 to 10 minutes to load. To confuse things a little more sometimes they work and some days they do not work.

Example: Google Fonts – internet content often uses Google fonts for formatting the text etc. If you are using Google Fonts, loaded from a Google server, on some days your internet content will not load under 5 minutes!

This applies to all Google services; email, maps, photos, website analysis, etc.

Our services can help to resolve these issues. We recommend testing your internet contents from China - Web Page Test

 last modified: Version 1.3 - 04 July 2019