Internet and Other Digital Resources
Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng’s Practical A–Z
Access to the Internet is easier to obtain than in many other parts of the world: most cafés have wireless Internet and hotels down to the meanest two-star offer wireless or occasionally wired Internet for free. There’s even free wi-fi on Běijīng’s buses, although an application must be downloaded to tablet or phone make it work.
On the other hand access to much of what you’d like to see or use is blocked either partially and intermittently, or completely and permanently. Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Instagram, Flickr, much of Tumblr, Picasa and indeed almost anything to do with Google are blocked, although, with characteristic hypocrisy, state-owned media such as People’s Daily and CCTV make use of them. Reliable media such as The Guardian, the New York Times, much of the BBC, and the Wall Street Journal are blocked at least in part, as well as some of Wikipedia and all of YouTube and Vimeo. Seach engines such as Google (again) and DuckDuckGo are inaccessible and others only remain accessible by censoring their search results. Tools such as Dropbox and other drive-sharing or cloud services, Feedburner, assorted URL shorteners, and Pirate Bay-like sites are all hidden behind what is commonly known as The Great Firewall of China. Attempt to reach these sites, or attempt to enter certain terms in what search engines you can reach, and you’ll receive a message in Chinese telling you that access is forbidden. In some cases your Internet connection will be reset, and there’ll be a delay before you can re-connect. News on what’s blocked, on cyber-censorship in general, and advice for cirvumvention may be found at en.greatfire.org. According to one ranking altogether 135 of the world’s top 1000 sites are blocked in China. If you wish to test the availability of any particular Web address when in China, test it at www.blockedinchina.net or www.greatfirewallofchina.org (accuracy of either not independently verified).
Under President Xí Jìnpíng who took office in March 2013, things have become progressively worse. No one may put up a web page in China without first getting a license number. Tweets the government deems negative automatically attract substantial penalties if re-tweeted more then a certain number of times. Streaming services have been told to drop certain popular foreign television series, even where they were being shown legally. New series must be approved by censors before being shown. This has nothing whatsoever to do with protection of copyright holders but only with ensuring that no ideas critical of the Party or inimical to its own views get a domestic airing, even through fiction. VPNs (see below) have come under strong attack, and some email services are blocked completely.
The Great Firewall is just part of an overall system of observation and control called the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程, Jīndùn Gōngchéng), which includes censoring search engine enquiries, blogposts, micro-blogs, and phone texts. Filtered terms include the names of China’s senior leaders, of institutions such as Amnesty International, and those connected with stories it wishes to suppress, however innocuous those terms may seem out of context. Examples have included 我爸是李刚 (Wǒ bà shì Lǐ Gāng, My dad is Lǐ Gāng) — the response of a much-despised hit-and-run driver that became a tool for mocking officials’ immunity from prosecution and public censure; 三十五 (sānshíwǔ, thirty-five) — 35 May is code for 4 June, the date of the 1989 Tiān’ān Mén slaughter; and 法拉利 (Fǎlālì, Ferrari) — attempts to cover up the death of a senior official’s son who crashed his Ferrari eventually led to the downfalls of several figures.
At times this project goes beyond irony. In 2014, 4 December was declared China’s first Constitution Day but ‘constitution’ and ‘constitutionalism’ simultaneously became the most frequently deleted terms on China’s answer to Twitter, and a post that quoted article 35, which guarantees freedom of speech, was swiftly deleted. Commenting on free speech is forbidden.
Some of the forbidden words and phrases arise from the activities of the human flesh search engine (rénròu sōu suŏ, 人肉搜索). On certain popular Chinese forums so many people address themselves to a problem that it can be solved by the sheer brute force of the number of minds at work. While this processing power has at times been used to reveal official corruption, it has just as often turned vigilante. The ‘engine’ quickly identified the speaker of the ‘My dad is Lǐ Gāng’ line, mentioned above, and put his photos and personal information on-line as well as evidence suggesting that his father, a Public Security Bureau official, was involved in corrupt real estate dealings.
In another case a young women uploaded to a fetish site a disturbing video of herself using her stilettos to spear and crush the life from a kitten, attracting huge condemnation when it achieved wider distribution. Within a week the ‘engine’ had identified the Kitten Killer of Hángzhōu, and placed her name, address, telephone number, place of employment and other personal details on-line. She lost her job. A Chinese overseas student at a university in the US who dared to speak up in favour of the rights of Tibetans also had her details discovered and revealed, as well as those of her parents, who then had human waste dumped on their doorstep. Despite constant government efforts to rein it in, the Chinese Internet sometimes seems more unruly than the uncensored Western version.
There are supposedly 30,000 censors employed ceaselessly to patrol the Chinese Internet for criticism of the government, or mentions of topics the government has banned from discussion. Departments able to delete postings on the Internet merely with a phone call include the State Council Information Office, the State Internet Information Office, the Propaganda Department, the Public Security Bureau, as well as almost any top government official. It is claimed one billion posts were deleted in 2014.
The main architect of the Great Firewall is one Fāng Bīnxīng (方滨兴), formerly dean of a Běijīng university, who, despite vast competition from other government figures, may well be the most unpopular person in China, at least amongst the digitally competent. In 2011 a student who tweets as @hanunyi (寒君依) hit him on the head with a thrown shoe, became an instant celebrity as a result, and was showered with gifts and offers of employment. After Fāng unwisely opened a Wēibó account (similar to Twitter) the amount of abuse he received forced him to shut down comments. Later admitting that he used no fewer than six VPNs (virtual private networks) to circumvent his own system, he received further abuse, and his 2013 New Year greeting was re-tweeted over 10,000 times with a single-character expletive attached (滚), translatable kindly as ‘scram!’ or ‘get lost!’, but actually meaning something considerably less printable.
For many foreign sites banned on the Internet there are highly successful Chinese equivalents, the government having banned the foreign versions partly to allow more easily controllable domestic versions to flourish in their place, and keep profits within China. Blocked Facebook is replaced by Rénrén (人人网, Rénrén Wǎng, ‘Internet for Everyone’); and Twitter by wēibó (微博, simply meaning ‘microblog’) but sometimes specifically referring to Sina Wēibó, as opposed to Tencent or other wēibó service providers. (This is a very popular medium: 140 characters in English may not amount to much more than a T-shirt slogan but 140 Chinese characters is a mini-essay.) Instant messaging such as Tencent QQ is rapidly being replaced by voice messaging app WeChat (微信, Wēixìn, ‘micro message’), also gaining popularity overseas, which allows voice messages to be sent as data — hence the sight of Chinese speaking into their phones while not holding them to their ears.
In China WeChat is the Swiss army knife of apps, one that every single Chinese has on his or her phone. People are now more likely to exchange WeChat contacts than business cards, one phone scanning another. The app also has group chat functions almost universally used for organisation, Tinder-style dating, access to event tickets, and a payment system so universally used that even someone with a cartload of vegetables at the side of the street is likely to have a QR code for you to scan. But the app is also famous as possibly the least secure of any of its kind, with a back door to let the Chinese government in and upload to your phone whatever it likes. All communications, even photographs, are monitored. Use too many restricted terms, or say something about the events of 4 June 1989 and you’ll find access shut down, only revived if you allow the app to take your photo and record your voice. You may, at this point, be thinking of a certain dystopian novel.
Alibaba’s Táobǎo (淘宝网, Táobǎo Wǎng) is China’s answer to Amazon and eBay, although with the majority of business being fixed price sales rather than auctions, and the company is many times the size of its foreign competitors. There’s almost nothing you can’t buy, and often at prices a fraction of those seen at home, and in the case of Chinese goods a fraction of those at markets and tourist shops, although a Chinese ID number and local credit card are needed, not to mention knowledge of Chinese.
Bǎidù (百度) is China’s heavily censored answer to Google search, dominant since Google finally admitted it was censoring search results in China and declined to continue to do so. Bǎidù Bǎikē (白度百科) is the equally censored answer to Wikipedia.
Access
Bring your own wi-fi-enabled phone, tablet, or laptop and access to a censored version of the Internet is easy. Wireless wi-fi (which officially must be called WLAN, but often isn’t) is freely available even in most backpacker hostels and only a few foreign-run top-end hotels attempt to charge. Service, while not always of the speediest, is adequate for most purposes. In some hotels service actually goes uncensored where Hong Kong managements have organised access via their for now uncensored home base.
Acquiring a local number for your phone along with data provision is cheap and possible in minutes, despite regulations suggesting the contrary. See Telephones.
Rare the café that fails to provide wireless access, there’s even Internet on city buses, although this requires a command of Chinese and the downloading of an app, and at the Capital Airport, although you’ll need to pick up a password from a service desk. 400 free wi-fi hotspots are promised.
But if you’re without your own machine you’ll need an Internet café, although many of even the cheapest hotels have terminals available, too. These have been in decline for some years — it is claimed that 10,000 shut across China during 2011–12 alone — due to restrictions on the ages of those allowed inside, the requirement to provide ID (a passport in your case), restrictions requiring Internet cafés to be located no closer than 200m to schools and government offices, and the holding of managements responsible for any activity of which the government disapproves. This includes trying to prevent schoolchildren in particular from becoming addicted to on-line gaming, since school hours are wasted in these cafés, and even days at a time, as children seek an escape from reality. The government estimates their numbers at over two million, has teams of volunteers who patrol cafés on the look-out for teenagers, some of whom are packed off to Internet addiction centres.
But the children are a major source of income for Internet cafés, and flouting restrictions has long been necessary for any café-owner wishing to make a profit. Computers may be more common in homes now, and the mobile phone rapidly becoming the favoured way to reach the Internet, but cafés have faster and more up-to-date computers and often more rapid connections. So your attempts to read email from home will be frequently disrupted by the sounds of gunfire, and shouts of “The terrorists win!”
Be very cautious about using Internet cafés to log-in to critical sites and about security in general, as key-logging software may well trap your activities and passwords. The restrictions were unexpectedly eased in December 2014 and Internet cafés seem set to grow in numbers again. Just look, mainly on side streets, for the characters 网吧. You’ll need your passport (which you should be carrying with you anyway, as Chinese law requires this.)
Before you leave home
If you want to be certain of access to the whole Internet, which may include some email services (especially Gmail), your bank’s site, and similar essential practical sites, and for the Chinese state (and other states) to be unaware what you’re doing, you’ll need a VPN — Virtual Private Network. This makes your computer appear to be somewhere other than in China, or nowhere in particular, and prevents the detection of which sites you are attempting to visit, thwarting attempts to block them.
There’s a constant battle between VPN providers and Chinese censors similar to that seen over the centuries between scruffy mounted nomads and the builders of the Great Wall, with attacks and defences both under constant development. In this case you’re the scruffy nomad who for a little effort can get round the vast and expensive wall, but you’ll need to do your research and download any applications necessary, pay subscriptions, etc. before leaving home.
While there are free VPNs these rarely work for long. Some commercial services have given up the struggle against the resources of an entire state, but others are reliably available for low monthly fees. VPNs are in fact illegal, although the government uses them itself. Foreign companies offering VPN services in China are required to register themselves, although none have ever done so as it has been made clear that registration would be denied.
One particularly robust method of getting round The Great Firewall is The Onion Router. This is not so easy to set up, but is the method of choice for many kinds of people wishing to keep their on-line activities a secret, to the point at which using it may guarantee that you attract NSA, GCHQ, or similar attention, on the grounds that if you are hiding something it may be something interest to them. Payment is by donation, and the TOR website offers extensive advice on other computer settings to keep yourself below the radar. See www.torproject.com for further details. Witopia has also proved itself successful at keeping the Chinese authorities at bay and is easier to operate. It has excellent on-line support, and its monthly fees include a VPN for your mobile phone, too, which can be activated once you reach China. See www.witopia.net. See also www.strongvpn.com and www.astrill.com.
However, the main problem with all this advice is that there may be no functioning VPNs in China at all by the time you arrive, and access to much of the Internet may be unavailable. In July 2017 the government instructed all ISPs to bar VPN use by 1 February 2018. If you’re at a rare top-end hotel that receives Internet service directly from Hong Kong, or if you’re a guest of friends resident in certain compounds home to a high proportion of high-level cadres you may find a less-censored Internet. But for most visitors, unless the war between censors and those who want to escape censorship manages to produce other routes around the Great Firewall, expect access to much social media and news and reference material including these pages, as well as certain email servers, to be unavailable. It is also perfectly possible that the government will fail to follow through (as has happened before) or that only Chinese VPN services will close down, and that those outside China will simply continue to adapt to evolving Chinese firewalls.
Business users, especially those negotiating with Chinese entities, should be exceptionally cautious about communicating any information critical to success over the Internet; leaving their machines unattended at any time; inserting any disk or drive or downloading any file provided by any Chinese opposite number or third party; or indeed connecting to the Internet at any time in China without precautions. Consult your IT department before leaving home. Applications such as Skype should not be downloaded in China, as in some cases their Chinese versions, even those with English-language interfaces, are known to have backdoor access for government surveillance that completely negates any security.
Don’t forget to download and print or transfer to your device the maps to accompany this book which will eventually be found at www.datasinica.com. This site is not accessible from within China without a VPN, and although the maps are still available via maps.google.com there is no guarantee that this site will remain available.
Mailing lists
The 20-year-old Oriental-List offers discussion of all aspects of China travel in general, and of this book in particular, and any queries should be posted there. Its membership includes several China guidebook authors as well as foreign correspondents in China, other foreign residents, and travellers of long China experience as well as those planning their first trips. To subscribe, send a blank email to subscribe-oriental-list@datasinica.com, watch for an automated reply (check junk mail folder), and reply to that to confirm. Unsubscribing is just as easy.
World-Wide Web
Many useful websites are given throughout this book, but here are just a few sites it may be useful to look at both before and after arrival, where possible — a partial list of key English-language sites and services blocked in China may be found at whatblocked.com, although use of a VPN (see above) will make them accessible again.
Warning: You should in general not be booking travel services of any kind — train tickets, cars and drivers, tours, or individual guides — from Chinese companies or individuals advertising their services on the Internet in English. Doing so will only guarantee you pay more than you need to (often several times more), and will be taken for a ride in two senses at once. Be very cautious even of those individuals or services you see recommended on China travel discussion sites by other travellers or expats who have used them. Even when posting with every intention of being helpful, these people typically have no clue at all as to real costs, as to what deceptions were practised upon them, or of any alternatives to the service they booked.
Google maps, maps.google.com, has been spottily accessible since 2015, and also comes in a version with more Chinese characters intended for the local market: ditu.google.com. Note that, presumably as a price for continued accessibility, the Chinese government makes Google keep the satellite view out-of-synch with the map view, and your own location will be shown incorrectly in satellite view on a mobile device. Switching between views is likely to cause confusion. Also, various military encampments around the Summer Palace and likely other sensitive sites appear to have been erased from satellite view. For an amusing Sim City-like alternative, see beijing.edushi.com.
For details of worthwhile news sites, many not accessible from within China, see Media. For information on events, entertainment, and restaurants, albeit not always accurate or even literate, see The Beijinger (thebeijinger.com), and Time Out Beijing (www.timeoutbeijing.com). For those with Mandarin skills www.dianping.com/beijing is the last word in restaurant listings, although the user-contributed reviews need treating with even more scepticism than those of similar English-language sites.
For transport information see www.bjsubway.com for most metro lines (although this struggles to keep up with the construction of new lines), and www.mtr.bj.cn for lines 4 and 14, and the Dàxīng Line. www.bjsubway.com/subwaymap/station_map.html allows you to calculate fares and routes across the system, and is not too difficult without Mandarin. See By Metro for details of how to use it. There’s a similar but more complicated Chinese-only equivalent for city bus routes and long-distance buses at www.bjbus.com. Another useful Chinese-only site for metro and bus routes is beijing.8684.cn.
Details of trains out of the city (you’ll need to know the characters for your destination) can be found at www.bjrailwaystation.com.cn/huochezhan/beijingzhan.html (Běijīng Station), www.bjrailwaystation.com.cn/huochezhan/beijingnanzhan.html (Běijīng South), www.bjrailwaystation.com.cn/huochezhan/beijingxizhan.html (Běijīng West), and www.bjrailwaystation.com.cn/huochezhan/beijingbeizhan.html (Běijīng North). Those with Chinese skills can interrogate sites such as www.12306.cn (the official booking site, but Chinese ID and payment card required), or www.huochepiao.com.
You shouldn’t shop there, but to get some idea of how little you should be paying for domestic and international air departures look at flight.elong.net and english.ctrip.com (both in English), then haggle for a lower price with a local agency. See by air in Getting Away. Capital Airport has an English-language site at en.bcia.com.cn.
Some idea of the proper prices for Chinese-run hotels can also be found on the same sites, although again you can often improve on them over the counter. Foreign-run hotels usually guarantee that the best available price for their rooms can be found on their own websites, and you should book directly. See Accommodation.
All the usual weather sites cover Běijīng. For historic figures, month by month, see www.weatherbase.com. To see if the air is breathable, consult twitter.com/beijingair.
Most sights mentioned in this book have their own websites listed with them. Note that Chinese institutions seem rarely to remember to renew the registration of their domain names, and often transfer their pages to a new address. If an address fails please mention it on The Oriental-List (see Mailing Lists, above), and use a search engine to find an alternative. Web pages are not reliably kept up to date.
Language assistance includes the limited on-line Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin dictionary at linedictionary.naver.com/dict.html#/cnen. This will also read out loud for you any Mandarin phrase. Assorted on-line Mandarin lessons include those of Pop-Up Chinese, with beginner lessons which may be played for free and are downloadable as podcasts at popupchinese.com. See Elementary Mandarin for Travellers to China.
Blogs
The local listings magazines mentioned above all run blogs occasionally of relevance to the visitor, although mostly discussing Western-style bars and restaurants, but occasionally transport, pollution, and other practicalities. For those looking to learn about China prior to arrival blogs that translate Chinese media and on-line comment about hot topics are worthwhile, from the often lurid ChinaSMACK (www.chinasmack.com) to the steadier Tea Leaf Nation (www.tealeafnation), now affiliated with Foreign Policy magazine. The Asia Society’s ChinaFile has dense reporting on modern Chinese society from many well-informed commentors (www.chinafile.com). Sinocism.com, also available as an email newslatter, provides commentary on and links to multiple English- and Chinese-language news sources. The grimmer side of China’s human rights situation is chronicled at the Duì Huà Human Rights Journal (www.duihuahrjournal.com), and there’s expert media analysis at Hong Kong University’s China Media Project (cmp.hku.hk) and at China Digital Times (chinadigitaltimes.net). Much thoughtful analysis of contemporary China may be found at the Australian University’s The China Story (www.thechinastory.org).
Communication and social media
For a list of banned terms see China Digital Times’ Grass Mud Horse List (‘Grass’, ‘Mud’, and ‘Horse’ in Mandarin are homophones for the three characters in a pungent phrase to do with sexual intercourse of the kind cleaned off the Internet by the authorities, and widely used to mock their efforts) at chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/grass-mud-horse-list. Use of these terms may affect email, texts, and microblogging, but for most of the time for most visitors communicating in English their effects are invisible.
Your email client should function as normal, unless your domain has been blocked for any reason. Popularly thought secure Gmail has encountered assorted blocks and was severely restricted in early 2015. If not planning to set up a VPN then set up an alternative email account before departure. Skype, Facetime, and similar VOIP applications work fine in China where there’s adequate bandwidth, so calling home for free or very little is possible. For the use of actual telephones see Telephones. Desktop messaging applications such as Apple’s iMessage also work well for now.
Most commonly used social media and photo-sharing sites such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China, but accessible with a VPN.
Mobile phone and tablet apps
For information on getting a local SIM card and data services see Telephones.
There are many Běijīng guide apps, few of which contain more than a tiny proportion of the detail in this book, are of dubious accuracy (one famously went on sale with ‘Bejing’ [sic] in large type on its opening screen), and whose navigation assistance, even where well implemented, is adequately dealt with by existing map applications. If you have no local SIM card simply load maps into memory over wi-fi and search for destinations before leaving your hotel. For those with Chinese the restaurant review site Diǎnpíng has an app: 大众点评网 (Dàzhòng Diǎnpíng Wǎng).
Communications apps have now become unreliable, with WhatsApp blocked since late-2017, the government likely disliking its end-to-end encryption. Chinese voice messaging app WeChat (微信, Wēixìn, www.wechat.com) is a favourite with anyone who has Chinese friends, but note that downloading it offers the Chinese authorities a backdoor into your phone, allowing all sorts of possible control and the covert uploading of surveillance software. The app anyway gives the Chinese government unrestricted access to all your personal data.
There are assorted bus, metro, and train apps, but many of these have short lifespans, and may not be kept up to date. Some good ones, e.g. Chēláile, use realtime GPS tracking data to give you information about your bus journey, but don’t yet work in Běijīng, and only have Chinese interfaces. If you can manage in Chinese, then 8684地铁 and 8684公交 are your best choices. So far TSP Holdings Ltd’s very useful Beijing Subway app has been kept up to date, has an English interface, plans routes between any two chosen stations, provides journey times, and calculates ticket prices.
Chinese-language 滴滴出行 (Dīdī Chūxíng, www.xiaojukeji.com) is the result of the fusion of two competing apps in response to the arrival of foreign ride-sharing/taxi-hailing service Uber whose Chinese venture it has also now swallowed. The Uber app for China no longer works overseas, and Uber apps from anywhere else don’t work in China.
At one point ride-sharing apps were banned, and use of vehicles not officially registered as taxis was prohibited from early 2015, although drivers went on to demonstrate this is precisely the sort of restriction routinely ignored in China. The Dīdī Chūxíng app shows a map with the locations of nearby taxis and sends them details of your trip to see if any will accept. A supplemental charge is payable. They claim tens of millions of taxi bookings a day. For most visitors, waving a hand at the side of the road will remain the best choice.
Air quality apps that report on the concentrations of various sorts of pollution in Beijing are numerous, and on every expat’s phone. The best compare the official figures with those from the US embassy’s rooftop machines, and issue alerts when the levels of dangerous particles rise, but sometimes succumb to pressure to remove the US information. Choose one that at least includes that before downloading.
The last word in language apps is Pleco Chinese dictionary (www.pleco.com), which comes with two free dictionaries and the option to purchase over two dozen others. A combined search function allows English or pinyin input, as well as handwriting recognition that’s remarkably tolerant of incorrect stroke order, and permits you to hand the phone to Chinese speakers to write down what they’re trying to say to you. The software will speak characters for you, and paid-for add-ons improve that, as well as providing OCR recognition of characters using your phone’s camera, the tap-on translation of terms in imported documents, flashcard creation for learners, and animated diagrams to demonstrate stroke order and direction for those learning to write. The Google Translate app will use your phone’s camera to attempt a live translation, with mixed success, of any text at which you point it.
For socialising, Mòmo (陌陌) (immomo.com) is Běijīng’s answer to Tinder, is shortly to be available in English. According to a 2015 survey nearly three quarters of Chinese women expect their partners to own a home, and earn double what they do.
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