Although Western media has run a lot of stories about the “Great Firewall”, I’ve seen three main points that aren’t usually addressed:

• How easy it is to get around the firewall
• Content that Western interests block from being seen in China
• Content that is available in China but not in the West

I’ll talk about the last bullet in this post.

My wife and I have started watching Grey’s Anatomy. We watch it by going to a site called youku.com, The episodes are posted pretty much when they are aired in the States, and have English and Chinese subtitles on them.

Here’s a screenshot:

Now, if I try to view the page with an IP Address outside of Mainland China (which I’ll probably talk more about in a later post), here’s what I get:

The wiki page I referenced about Youku talks a bit about why this might be occurring.

btw, I found the first entry of the Major investors in the History section of the Wikipedia page interesting.