It was celebration time in China a month ago when a longstanding block on Wikipedia was finally lifted. Yes, there had always been ways around it, such as proxy servers, Gollum and various shameless scraping sites. But it was convenient to be able to hit the real thing again without having to resort to time-consuming workarounds. It was also exciting for users of Wikipedia's Chinese language site who, as Andrew Lih reported just four days ago, started signing up in much larger numbers once the block was lifted. Unfortunately, our renewed Wiki-bliss didn't last long. Today, nanny has dropped the hammer on Wikipedia again, and we're back to using workarounds.

Gone again...

Why the indecisive approach to the block? Well, it's hard to know what motivates individual decisions. But as we gnash our teeth over this, it's worth remembering a couple of things.

The Great Firewall is not monolithic
I wrote about this a bit recently (in a post in which I also warned that the opening might be temporary). The Great Firewall is not one giant, malevolent computer that watches the entire Chinese Internet. Blocks are, rather, implemented at various levels corresponding to different parts of China's network infrastructure. As you would expect, these blocks are often inconsistent. Lih has also remarked a bit on this, including in an interesting post today analyzing the reinstated block on Wikipedia and suggesting that it may take a few days for the full situation to become clear.

Sudden changes and brief fits are normal
Nanny has always been subject to fits. Whether management of system is sloppy, lines of authority are unclear, or the Government likes to float trial balloons--or even all of the above--it is quite common for a long-blocked site to suddenly reappear for a while and then suddenly vanish again. This happened recently with Blogspot, which is now blocked again after a few weeks of open access, and also happened less dramatically with Technorati. This is why I warned in my October 13 post that it would be best not to get too excited.

Recent trends have not been altogether good
As the preceding paragraph suggests, we've been teased a lot recently. There have been several temporary liftings of blocks on important sites. Some have been brief enough to look like side effects of the Great Firewall's somewhat patchwork nature. Some have been long enough to look like experiments or the results of policy arguments. However, I can't think of any long-blocked site that has had its block permanently lifted in the past year. It's interesting to note, however, that while commercial information sites have been relatively stable, "user-generated" sites like Wikipedia and Blogspot have been the subject of much fluctuation. As always, I continue to watch YouTube with anxiety.

Content and censorship decision in China are complex
It's pretty common for foreigners to project rather simplistic motivations on China's censorship decisions. Usually these boil down to censorship for censorship's sake. While that's undoubtedly true some of the time, censorship is more than just information control: It's business and political leverage as well. China has deeper agendas than simply controlling undesirable content, important as that is. These include gaining leverage over foreign companies and finding ways to give domestic companies an advantage. That's as true of Internet companies as it is of banks, manufacturers or any other kind of company.

So what will happen with the Wikipedia block? Time will tell. But on recent trends, I'll be ready to start using proxies again.