The horrors of using the Internet in China

Google is a frighteningly huge part of my (and probably your) daily life. If I have a vital question, like “ expired milk that has solidified is the same as yogurt, right?”, I google that shit. If I need to know the name of that actress who was just topless on Game of Thrones for, you know, educational purposes? Googled. My email? Gmail. Documents? Google Drive. Honestly, Google has replaced my parents (finally), friends, encyclopedias, maps, phone books, travel agents and countless other resources as the primary source of information. Now imagine for a second that it doesn’t exist.

Welcome to using the Internet in China! It’s a fucking nightmare. Without something called a VPN (virtual private network), everyone in China is subjected to a heavily censored version of the lawless world-wide-web that we know and love.
Maybe you think not being able to Google things isn’t that bad. First, yes it is. Try using Bing for a day and you’ll feel the cloud-based soul being sucked from your virtual avatar. But that’s not all.

Okay, so I can’t google anything, but I can type in facebook.com. Oh wait, Facebook is blocked too. How the hell am I going to be able to stalk these hot girls I went to high school with to see if they got fat and/or pregnant now? Twitter? No go. Most non-Chinese news websites, which are important if you’re a nerd, and king of cute cat videos, Youtube, are also inaccessable.

Perhaps the worst of all these transgressions however is the final one: Porn, all of it, is blocked. What the fuck China? I can’t watch cat videos, can’t follow Justin Bieber’s tweets, can’t leave disparaging comments on my friend’s photos and I can’t watch porn? What the hell is the Internet even good for now?

If these problems weren’t bad enough, the internet speed in China is absolutely abysmal. Four of the top six countries in terms of internet speed? Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. Literally China’s neighbors? China however. Down in the mid fourties! Just under Malta, and slightly better than The Isle of Man. Suck on that, Isle of Man! (Update: Now it’s even slower than we’d feared!)

I could go on, but I think you get the point. So next time you complain about your internet speed, or the fact that the government might be reading your emails to see if your subject line includes “cheapest homemade bomb construction”, remember that the country with the most internet users in the world by a large margin, everything is slow, censored, and if you post something against the government you could be thrown in prison, no questions asked. I live in China, and there’s probably a chance I could be shut down for even writing and posting this

And yeah, a VPN means you can access all these censored sites (sometimes), but that slows everything down even more. If you enjoy staring at the one frozen, pixilated frame of what you hope is two people having sex, and not some anime bestiality while a buffering circle spins for eternity, then get your ass out to China. The weather’s great too! 30 days of sun and 335 of polluted haze. Think of all the money you’ll save on sunscreen.