The Great Firewall

I agonized over and delayed putting up the last two posts because of their political nature. I discussed with Paige and got her blessing in the belief of freedom of speech before adding them.

When we were in China, in the morning before we were to tour Tianamen Square, I tried to Google "Tianamen Square," to brush up on my history and make sure I had the facts straight (I remember as a college student watching the news footage of tanks rolling over student protestors). Lots of hits appeared on Google under the title of "Tianamen Square," but when I tried to click on any of them I ran into what the Chinese call The Great Firewall. Essentially this is internet censorship. The Chinese government blocks much information it doesn't want its citizens to to find, including websites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

In fact, The Great Firewall nearly prevented our own excellent adventure blog from happening at all. Paige and I were not able to access Blogger from within China via the internet. You can imagine our panic. However, the technology gods had our backs, and very fortunately the Blogger app that Paige had installed on her iPad allowed us to create and upload posts. The strange and nerve-wracking part was that we could not then see what we had posted. So we relied on you, our faithful blog followers, to reassure us via e-mail that you could indeed see all of our posts, and that yes, they did make sense!  
- Peggy