Go Google Yourself China!

When someone really faked off my dad, his most common and fiercest reply was "Why don't you go fak yourself and see how that works out for you?" In the spirit of that feeling, I take the liberty of tweaking it a bit to apply to the latest row between Google and my favorite place on earth: China. You know, China, where the internet is free, and the rest of us are being unreasonable imperialist faks.

To China I say: "Why don't you go Google yourself and see what results for you?" However, before you do, I dare you to drop your censors first. Then, let's compare the before and after screenshots. Are you man enough to come out from behind the Great Firewall of China, officially known as the Golden Shield Project, and show us what results from random searches on some of your favorite keywords like taboo Tibet and Tiananmen Square just for kicks.

Lucky for us, someone's already done this for illustrative purposes. In these screenshots that show side by side results for the search term ‘Tiananmen Square protest' performed within China and then in the United Kingdom, guess what? You get VERY different results. Shocking! I'd say China's been caught red-handed.

As you can see, if you follow the link above, there are stark differences between the two. Within China, if you search for ‘Tiananmen Square' it appears to be a hopping tourist destination with pictures of temples and statues and smiling faces. What's missing here? Oh yeah, the pictures of protests and dead bodies that result if one's to search for the same thing on a computer in the UK. How can that be?

Ok, so China admits that it censors - all while continuing to claim the internet is free - but it does so with its citizens' best interest in mind. How heartwarming! China's just trying to protect its sweet and innocent citizens from pornographic content. Oh, in that case, but but, I must be missing something here.

I'm looking at these UK results and maybe I'm not twisted enough but I don't see anything pornographic here. Were there sex acts occurring on the streets that day? Nope, couldn't mistake the Tiananmen protests for Mardi Gras in New Orleans. No flashing of breasts or oral sex occurring on nearby balconies. That's not it. Does China maybe have an underground population with a serious tank fetish? Or, are you censoring that which'd only be appealingly pornographic to necrophiliacs who might get off on viewing images of the corpses of the people you killed that day because they had the balls to stand up to your  faking bullshit? Is that the pornography to which you refer? Do you really have such a huge problem with necrophilia in your country or are you just full of shit? There is another possibility though - an innocent misunderstanding.

Perhaps you're not just the most repressive controlling faks on earth but rather are merely the victims of very inaccurate dictionaries. It'd make sense since your definitions of words often conflict with the universally accepted definitions of words. Maybe in Chinese ‘pornography' is more widely defined to include both lewd sex acts between cosmetically enhanced individuals performed against the common backdrop of cheesy music as well as ANYTHING that exposes China for the FAK it is. I can almost accept that as a possibility because your dictionary also seems to have a very faked up definition of the word ‘freedom.' 

Freedom's always been a troublesome word for you, hasn't it, China? It troubles you in the same way Bush always fumbles over ‘nuclear.' Recent news grants us yet another illustrative example via your ongoing row with Google.

China claims the internet is free within its borders but then tells companies like Google it's free to repect China's laws of censorship to continue operating there. China, are you listening to yourself? This is one of those cases where it's either one or the other. It is linguistically impossible for it to be both. Free or censored. Pick one.

You're free to do as you please as long as you follow my rules. Do you see where the problem lies via simple logic? If the internet is free in China, there'd be NO censorship. China even requires censorship software to be installed on all pcs within China to protect, of course, against pornographic and/or violent content. What about kung fu films? Are they ok? I rather like the countermeasure I call the ‘fakuChina' software designed to skirt around the restrictions of the Great Firewall of China.

But, Google has one better. It's about had it with your shit and Google has threatened to leave your sorry ass over your constant nagging and indiscretions. Hacking into Gmail was the last straw especially since you got the attention of the US government with that move.

Google says it's no longer willing to censor search results just to make you happy, and will leave you if you don't like it. Granted, Google never should've agreed to your terms just to shack up with you in the first place. But, the honeymoon had to end sooner or later. Resentment builds over the little things each party foolishly thought could easily be overlooked, and before you know it, both parties recognize there's nothing between them now but irreconcilable differences. China and Google want different things; the time's come to go their separate ways or so it seems. China's the control freak whereas Google's more the free spirit. Opposites may attract but seldom do they survive the long haul especially when one party in the relationship(guess which?) makes a psychopath stalker look mild by comparison.

I must give Google credit though. I don't know how it operated within the faked up Chinese sphere for this long.

If China were a boyfriend, I'd have dumped 'him' long ago. He's boringly predictable with his lying control freak behavior. He always wants to know what you're doing, where you're going, whom you're seeing when you're there, etc etc. He ‘accidentally' reads your emails and text messages and doesn't like it when you associate with people who don't share his opinions. His bad behavior got old fast and boring even faster.

If China were a boyfriend, he'd be the guy who always wanted to go to the same restaurant for the same cuisine, gave the same gifts for the same holidays, talked about the same things from his very limited scope of conversation topics, never surprised you with a spontaneous kiss or unique plan for a Saturday, and never differentiated from the same sex position in the bed which was the only place he'd do it with you. China's the guy who always wants you to get on top because that's how he likes it, and he doesn't care if you climax because it's all about him and what he wants.

China's very much like that guy. Instead of the same restaurants, the same monotonous conversation, and boring bedroom routine, China's usual moves include: restricting internet access, banning foreign journalists, and refusing entry to anyone who might want to talk about what happened in reality as opposed to China's version of the story. China's behavior was as predictable as always last year for the 20^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

Ok, I'll grant them a bit of creative credit. They did throw a little variety into the routine this time. Just a few months before, after a video of police abuse of Tibetan protesters surfaced on YouTube, China blocked YouTube as we discussed in an earlier What the Fak article.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre  (that's right China, it was a massacre, not a clam bake), China blocked sites like Twitter, Flicker, Hotmail and played games with BBC tv

As usual - insert big yawn here - China claimed it had nothing to do with these service interruptions. Yeah it's not the least bit obvious that BBC news feeds are disrupted JUST when any Tiananmen-related report is being broadcast. Guess that's just coincidental.

China would never do such a thing. It doesn't hack into your emails or read your text messages when you're taking a shower to see with whom you're communicating. Tibetan and human rights activists are just imagining things. China's very pro-human rights especially when it comes to Tibet.I also never eat chocolate if I've already had some earlier in the day.

It must be exhaustive for China, though, to stage these little cover-up operations of denial every time there's a chance someone might remind it of something it did wrong. I imagine it like that episode of Friends when Ross sleeps with the girl from the copy place and, with Joey's guidance, runs around trying to cover the trail so Rachel doesn't find out.

Not only is China boringly predictable but China annoys me like ‘that guy' in the same way those guys fail to be real men and take responsibility for previous wrong-doing. When you try to talk with him about it, he not only bans the subject from discussion but also uses every resource at his disposal to deny it ever happened even if there's well-documented evidence to the contrary. China's like the guy who insults your intelligence because he tries to pull one over even though he knows you're smart enough to know better. Aside from a plethora of reasons to detest China, I think that last one is the one that really faks me off about a guy and/or China - insulting everyone's intelligence and expecting us all to play along and pretend it didn't do what we all know it did. How stupid does China think we are?

Like a crazed stalker of an ex-boyfriend, China doesn't get the message to fak off. Instead he stalks people lucky enough to get the fak away from him by hacking into emails of people living abroad - oh allegedly. The Gmail hack ‘allegedly' originated in China but really who the fak else would care about the activities of Tibet activists? Does it also have people driving by these people's houses to see who's sleeping over? Probably being the scary fak China is. China can't let go and wants to continually stick his nose into everyone's business even when they're no longer living under his roof. It's not happy enough to control its own population but wants to tell the entire world how to live even in cases as ‘trivial' as film festivals where it, surprise surprise, unleashes hacking attacks when it doesn't like what's playing as it did for the Melbourne Film Festival last year and most recently through a hissy fit over a scheduled screening of a documentary about Tibet and the Dalai Lama at a Palm Springs festival.

Yet again, China's acting in line with what we've come to expect: it desperately tries to stop the free flow of information that *might* call attention to its previous wrongs of which the world - by the way, China - is already well aware. Again, China fails to understand that THIS BEHAVIOR of suppression only calls MORE, not less, attention to how it's faked up. I realize it doesn't like everyone talking about it but this behavior only ensures everyone will talk about it MORE, not less as we saw with its intermittent YouTube outages strategically staged around events China wished the rest of the world would forget.  

I think it's funny how China basically insults the world's intelligence with these stunts. Do they expect us to look away and pretend history doesn't exist just because it highlights what a fak China is, has been, and will continue to be? Does it really think we won't instantly assume it guilty of crimes as China-specific as they get? Hacking is sort of your m.o. China so why bother strengthening the case against you by such complicit denial.

Does China expect us to act like people do at family gatherings where everyone pretends that Uncle Melvin doesn't have noxious body odor but rushes to find seating as far away from his offensive stench as possible? Or where everyone struggles to keep a straight face because Aunt Margie died her hair greenish blonde AGAIN but doesn't seem to know it? It almost reminds me of the guy who washes the other woman's lipstick off his collar and thinks that's as good as never having cheated. Sorry China, but even if you delete the 'sext' messages, pay cash for the hotel rooms, and have managed to cover your trail better than Ross did with the copy girl, you're still guilty.

We know you too well. We know you'd have done the same if you had a chance to do it all over again, and you'll continue to be the fak you've always been but you're boring us. We know you think you're so powerful because you're the largest holder of U.S. debt and poised to soon knock Japan off as the second largest economy in the world but we're onto you. We know you probably wet dream of the day you are strong enough to take over the world where everyone speaks Chinese. We know you're not offering US schools free teachers to teach Chinese out of the kindness of your heart because you don't have one.

Maybe, at the very least, you can swindle the US out of some of its democracy in exchange for a discount on that big US debt - maybe start suing US citizens who talk smack about you like we do in a blog just like ours.

Why don't you stick with those pressing issues in your country like enforcing your ban on lip syncing and karaoke - probably eventually punishable by death?

At least we finally found 2 things upon which we can agree. Maybe you're not so bad after all. Have you ever visited a karaoke bar, China? If not, you may want to hold off on that lip sync ban until you do.  In the meantime, if you get bored, you can always go fak yourself and see how that turns out for you. Don't bother reporting back to us because we know we won't get the truth anyway.