Internet censorship. It is a very topical issue to say the least. The attempts of the Chinese government, amongst others, to control what its citizens can view on the internet is well known (in the west anyway). My attempt to discover the amount of censorship on the Net in Cuba failed miserably… mainly because of the queue… be damned if I was going to spend my holiday standing in line, especially with Mojito’s to be drunk and cigars to be smoked!

Now, BEEZHOUSE.com has been a victim of censorship in the past. One of those large corporation type filtering sytems. In retrospect, may have been down to the fact that Oz had just posted about a guy who got busted fucking a goat. Then again, perhaps not! As you can see below, BEEZHOUSE.com is currently blocked at the moment in China. Without being in China, there is no way to know for sure, as sites “may [be] report[ed] as being ‘blocked’, while there are only technical reasons for their unavailability”. As our ClusterMap shows, we have been getting a number of readers over the last few months from China. However, as the BBC found out, “techincal problems” is widely regarded as euphemism for censorship.

I tried accessing the BBC News website but to no avail. A government official told me there must be what he called “a technical problem”. In truth, those “technical problems” are afflicting more and more information sites in China, for example the open source encyclopaedia Wikipedia, perhaps because it has fallen foul of the government’s recent declaration that news and information in today’s China should only be what it calls “healthy” and “in the public interest”.

The filtering systems used by the Chinese government are becoming more sophisticated, more refined and more extensive every year, involving an increasing number of local as well as foreign parties in their system. Both Reporters Sans Frontiers and Human Rights Watch maintain that Chinese censorship is some of the most elaborate and comprehensive in the world. Western companies have been accussed of aiding the Chinese government in its censorship. Only last month, Yahoo shareholders rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet. Yahoo has been criticized by human rights groups since 2005 for its role in turning over some political dissidents’ e-mails. The materials were used to prosecute and imprison them. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have all been accussed of “carrying out censorship for the Chinese government”.

Want to find out if your website is being blocked in China? Then check out this site, The Great Firewall of China, which provides real time testing of websites to see if they are blocked in China. The aim of the site is to make the censorship system transparent and keep open the discussion on censorship in order to prevent it becoming the norm across the Net.

Read more about Chinese censorship at the BBC website, here, here or here. Also of interest, NoLuv4Google.

Came across this one via Om ter saaist. Can’t quite remember how or why, since I don’t speak Dutch (or quite possiblely, Danish). Anyway, it’s not English… so I’ve got no idea what’s going on!

Random key words: Mao, Falungong, Tianammen Square, Human Rights, Organ Harvesting, Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian (over-rated).

How many of you out there are James Bond aficionados? Remember one of the first scenes in Live and Let Die (Roger Moore’s first in the role) where a funeral procession slowly, and mournfully, passes through the streets of New Orleans? A white dude asks a local whose funeral it is and the local says ‘Yours’ just as he stabs him. The funeral procession grabs the body and erupts into a raucous celebration for the life that was.

It seems the Chinese have gone one better in the entertainment stakes at funerals. Within Chinese custom it is believed that the more people you have at a funeral, the greater the luck for the family of the dearly departed. So how does one raise attendance at a funeral? With strippers of course! I don’t really get to go to many funerals so right now, that’s my excuse for not having come up with this idea. I wonder if it’s considered good luck to buy a lap dance for the dearly departed?

But before you rush to your nearest travel agent looking to book a Chinese funeral tour, officials have cracked down on this brilliant practice after an expose by CCTV. Personally, I though it would make a great Contiki Tour but it seems Chinese officials don’t share my enthusiasm. But fear not, loyal readers. Courtesy of our good friends at the Shanghaiist, you can watch the CCTV expose that led to the stripping-funeral ban. It’s a long clip (about 12mins in total), so give it time to load before you play. And if you can’t be bothered watching the whole clip and just want to see what all the fuss is about, try either the 6min or the 10min marks.

Wim Delvoye was born in 1965, in Wervik, Belgium. He lives and works in Gent and London.

Wim came to my attention recently during a program on our national broadcaster, the ABC. The show concentrated on “Cloaca” an installation created by Wim to replicate the human digestive system. Essentially the project allows the artist to insert food in one end and, after a series of processes we are all too familiar with, he is left with, well, faeces.

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