Well, it may be just one of those temporary blips, or it could be that the ever-mercurial Net nanny has decided that Blogspot really is too uncivilized for Chinese Internet users. At any rate it is, at least in Beijing, inaccessible again, as Danwei reports.

Such is life. We all got excited a couple of weeks ago when Wikipedia and Blogspot were suddenly accessible again. But it wouldn't be the first time that the restoration of a site is brief. To this day, the banned Technorati is prone to be suddenly accessible for a day or two from time to time. Nevertheless, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I'd gotten used to being able to read Blogspot blogs without going through a proxy.

I never thought of it that way...

As Andrew Lih in Hong Kong pointed out in a recent post on the Wikipedia situation, China's blocking of the Internet is not monolithic. It is implemented through a variety of systems that are inconsistently administered by different telcos and ISPs across the country. A site blocked in one area can be accessible in others, and blockages tend to ripple across the country rather than suddenly slamming down everywhere. Hence, the periodic emails that tend to rocket through the China blogging community from time to time as bloggers ask each other if a given site is still accessible.

The inconsistent nature of China's Internet censorship is why I think the Great Firewall is a good analogy, if you understand the actual Great Wall. The mythological Great Wall is a mighty rampart extending an unbroken 10,000 li from the ocean to the interior well along the Silk Road, designed to frustrate the Mongol horde. But the real Great Wall is actually a mishmash of discontinuous segments scattered across the country, built at different times, with different materials and architecture. And it was porous. (Obscure bits of it are still discovered, from time to time.)

And so it is with the Great Firewall, a mix of technologies and installations that overlap imperfectly. Ultimately it, too, is porous but, like its namesake, is still a significant barrier. It doesn't so much categorically block you as annoy you into submission.

Now the question is, will it last as long as its namesake?