Blogspot has re-disappeared, MSN Messenger is inaccessible from an artsy Beijing cafe, searches for Carrefour are just back from going unanswered, and the spring sky is clear. It's the 89th anniversary of China's May Fourth Movement.
In 1919, student activism took a powerful and still-honored turn for the patriotic in China. On May 4, thousands of students gathered at Tiananmen to protest the Treaty of Versailles and its treatment of previously German-held territory in Shandong Province, which was given to Japan rather than back to China.
Today, students have been at the forefront of recent demonstrations of national pride in the face of demonstrations against the Olympic flame as it toured the world. After a French demonstrator went after a woman carrying the torch in a wheelchair, anti-French sentiment was converted to demonstrations and boycotts directed against the French megamart Carrefour.
As with most political action these days, demonstrations have been organized using the internet, and indications are that Chinese authorities are out to keep things calm today. Bloggers such as Google Blogoscoped have spilt untold bytes discussing the fact that Google.cn now blocks Carrefour searches. That's now over, but Baidu had also severely limited its results for some days.
Today, from various connections in Beijing, the internet is palpably slower. One suspects the content filters are unusually active today, though it's always possible this has absolutely nothing to do with May Fourth. Slow internet days are a fact of life in China, where transpacific bandwidth has not yet grown to its full potential.
Either way, a South China Morning Post article the other day (not online) noted that the protests hit Carrefour's sales, and discourse on the anti-foreign protests, including vocal opponents of anti-Carrefour tactics, is healthy on the Chinese internet. Wang Jianshuo went to Carrefour yesterday, and shows us before and after photos: It's still undercrowded.
No one doubts the government's desire to avoid unrest and conflict leading up to the Olympics. There's no way to know whether today's molasses-speed connections are related to what day it is, but it wouldn't surprise me. For now, it's time for me to go celebrate Youth Day.
The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.
The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. "Google's partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications," Yahoo News reported.
Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason faster in Beijing than in Shanghai, but everywhere I've gone in China there's been some lag. (Speeds in Tokyo were very fast when I was there in late 2004 and 2005.)
The previously announced cable, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, is scheduled to be partially operational before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8. It will be the first direct connection between the United States and China.
[h/t: Kaiser]
As it stands, there's almost twice as much bandwidth across the Atlantic as there is across the Pacific. But with new U.S. FCC approval for the first ever China-U.S. fiber link, this is all about to change.
The score right now: 5,547 to 2,726. That's the current Atlantic vs. Pacific bandwidth score in gigabits per second, according to TeleGeography. The Trans-Pacific Express "will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second, and the system will have a design capacity of up to 5.12Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce," writes ChinaTechNews.
Construction has been under way since September, and should be complete before the Olympics. Internet speeds in Beijing are generally pretty good in my experience, but further south in Shanghai, much of the transpacific traffic is terribly sluggish on a variety of connections. Perhaps this is a matter of higher demand there, but with the FCC's approval for the cable to land in Oregon, things should get better soon.
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