I’m not sure I understand the reason for the rift between the Chinese state and the government. And I have no interest or intention of examining this now. However I really wonder if the hundreds of thousand of developers outside China really know that unwittingly they are joining in with Google and short-changing the Chinese people.I’m a fairly internet savvy guy and wherever I go I like to travel with my portable technology with me. In the 5 days I’ve been here I have already had to revise my attitude to China many times and internet access is one of them. So far, using Chinese internet connections I have yet to have a problem accessing the sites I’m used to accessing at home. To name a few that are accessible, bbc.co.uk, theregister.com, huffingtonpost.com, paypal.com, ebay.co.uk and en.wikipedia.org.
But the real problem arises on sites that use behind the scenes google resources and libraries. Because these are blocked then stuff doesn’t work. Basic stuff like:-
- those dreadful Captcha things that are designed to check if we are human and leave us feeling we are not when we get them wrong
- light box code to prettily display images
- areas on web pages that are designed to quickly give us access to information
This came to light as I discovered that the NextGen Gallery plugin on lostinchina.me.uk seemed to be broken. Whatever I tried I just couldn’t get the galleries to show in a lightbox and the slideshow wasn’t working yet it displayed fine when I’m connected to my PC at home. It turns out the NextGen are using googleapis.com for some of their libraries.
Wake up developers if you are having difficulty communication with the 1.3 billion Chinese people here, it’s fairly certain it’s because you are using google resources on your site, is this the best we can do?
2 thoughts on “Google and China”
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Fascinated by this, and of course you’re right. I wonder if that means that all Google services accessed/included via a cross site or 3rd party request are refused?
I know that all Google APIs and Webfonts have problems and need a workaround:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-fonts-china/
Also:
http://chineseseoshifu.com/blog/google-fonts-instable-in-china.html
Could well be, currently Mark tells me he’s unable to register on the expat website in Fuzhou as they use google API for the Captcha! How about getting one of your fellow Gurus to set up a test page and I’ll soon be able to see which Google services need to be watched could be usefule to make that info available to the community. Inetresting links BTW I might well hand edit the NextGen code to include it.