This isn’t a post about loneliness. This is a post about the internet.
Since about last Wednesday (March 2nd to be exact), we’ve largely had no internet over here in China. The connection has been deteriorating day by day, until sometime this afternoon we completely lost access and I sat dumbly across my computer screen at work refreshing Google Drive, willing it to work telepathically, and failing miserably.
Why is the internet in China on hiatus? Starting on Friday (and lasting until March 14th!!), China is holding its economic forum, which is as good of an excuse as any to end the proliferation of data. First, China shut down most foreigner VPN, leaving us without fun things like Facebook and Instagram, but also without essential things like Google or WordPress. Then, China Mobile service throttled LTE, and now, we can barely access the internet even without a VPN.
Moments like this make me feel truly powerless. The internet in China is, at most times, feeble than most, which in the year 2016 already feels ridiculous, but this is also symptomatic of being in a country that is so desperately trying to control our every move, and being so far out of the system, that I, as a foreigner, am powerless to change it. In any other place, an information block affecting a billion people would make international news or force at least a chunk of them to stand up. In China, everyone is largely keeping silent.
Living in China has made me take fewer things for granted. When you are waiting with bated breath for a 34mb VPN package to download over a course of four minutes, it feels like a small victory, but it’s the difference between accessing the internet or twiddling your thumbs for the next seven days. Did I mention this economic summit will last a while?
Ugh, this is crazy. Our internet hasn’t been working also, but its just a router problem. It drove me insane all weekend, even though I knew it was SUCH a first world problem. I can’t imagine if the country we lived in was trying to block our access, so sorry! Hang in there!
Thank you for the encouragement! It’s been difficult to even log into WP to see the comments! Even first world internet disconnections are frustrating! I remember my router failing when i first got to shanghai and had decent internet and it being almost as bad as this!
At first I was shocked about internet connection and speed in China as in Finland there was never any trouble. However then we moved to Germany and in our building the lines are so old and bad that a 16k connection is the highest available and failing non-stop (in Finland I had 110k connection for a third of the price…)
Oof! I remember living in a really old building in Connecticut and whenever AT&T installed internet for any other person in the building, they would cut my life, because everything was so convoluted, and I would be on the phone for days trying to restore it!
The thing is that this building is not even that old (built 1975) but they wanted to cut costs back then and the electrical equipment is a nightmare…
oh wow! that sounds like most of the infrastructure in China..
Yeah but thankfully it is the only thing they messed up that badly. I remember when my in laws visited us they were shocked to hear that our building is the same age as theirs….because their building/ neighborhood in the center of xi’an looks more like the ruins after an air raid during WWII 😀
I’m actually writing an entry about Xi’an right now ! I visited it a few weekends back!
Looking forward to read it then. I love to spend time in xi’an, especially due to the food. 🙂
I don’t know what makes me sadder. When I’m deprived of the internet or the fact that we can’t live without the internet anymore.
ahh yes, the saddest part is without google, it becomes so much harder to do tasks that would have taken two-three minutes to look up, and I end up spending even more time on the internet.