Author Archive for John Kennedy

small portrait of the author

About John Kennedy

Email John Kennedy

Recent Posts

Zhou “Zola” Shuguang, the IT blogger/Hunan vegetable vendor turned brave young citizen reporter with his blog coverage of the Chongqing Nailhouse earlier this year, was detained by police on Monday and sent home under constant police escort.

read full post »

The blogger behind one nominee in the Best of Blogs competition which concluded earlier this month had his house searched earlier today and his computer hard drive confiscated. Zhai Minglei, based in Shanghai, had in recent years left his job at one of China’s most widely-read liberal publications, Southern Weekly, to head up the grassroots [...]

read full post »

Is YouTube blocked in China? YouTube is blocked in China. And accompanying the news are more mentions of pathological GFW paroxysms than usual; blogspot is back, so is Flickr, sort of, and for a period of time yesterday, Live.com, Yahoo.com and blogsearch.google.cn were either inaccessible or being re-routed back to China’s result-censoring search engine Baidu, [...]

read full post »

Just days before we were reminded that China remains the world’s largest “prison” for bloggers and online journalists, with the former now at as great a threat as traditional reporters, and just three days before the Seventeenth Party Congress put the country on edge, a post appeared on V2EX, an IT community with a strong [...]

read full post »

Very annoying hearsay and bullshit is how the anonymous rumor from this past weekend that all RSS feeds have been blocked in China has been judged by bloggers both in the country itself, and those with years of posts spent dealing precisely with this ever-frustrating and -evolving complex matter; Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Chinese Media [...]

read full post »

There was a lot of scoffing last month when a big announcement was finally made of a pledge signed by many major blog providers encouraging their users to self-censor their blogging activities. The ‘new’ pact didn’t just rehash aims that many before it had attempted and largely failed to achieve, but the official justification given [...]

read full post »

Young bloggers from across the Middle East have joined forces to fight for the human rights of their Kurdish brethren: “Our first target is the media which is necessary for Kurds to voice their opinion, thus we are petitioning to unblock these voices, at least on the internet, our only media alternative against censorship and [...]

read full post »