Anyone who spends any time online in China knows surfing the Internet is like wading through quicksand. That is especially true when browsing Web sites not hosted on a Chinese server.
This week, an online report published by the government-run China Daily said that China, the world’s second-largest economy, ranked 91st in the world in Internet speed, with the average broadband connection speed reported at 9.46 megabits per second (Mbps).
The report ranked the top five countries in Internet speed as South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Japan and the Netherlands. The average broadband speed in South Korea was reported as 26.7 Mbps. In Sweden, it was 19.1 Mbps.
Photo: AP
Those statistics were part of a broader graphics-based report that was aimed at boasting China’s Internet connectivity, under the title Evolution of the Internet in China.
The report listed as its sources the China Internet Network Information Center, an agency under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; the Web site of the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper; the Broadband Development Alliance, a research organization; and Akamai Technologies, a content delivery network and cloud services provider based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The report promoted the fact that China now has 688 million people online, about half the population; that it added 40 million new Internet users last year and that 90 percent of users can get online via their mobile phones.
It also said 358 million people now make financial transactions using online payment tools.
The statistics showing China’s poor Internet speed were relegated to the bottom of the page.
Many foreign Web sites — including the New York Times, Google, Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and YouTube — are blocked by the so-called “Great Firewall,” the system of Internet censorship in China.
People who want to visit those sites must use software that provides a virtual private network, or VPN, which allows the user to go through a foreign server to get to the Web sites. That slows down Internet use even more. VPNs are also less reliable than ever in China, constantly dropping out.
In April, the man credited with developing the Great Firewall, Fang Binxing (方濱興), had to use a VPN to try to enter South Korean Web sites during a presentation he was giving at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute of Technology. The VPN kept dropping out, forcing him to ad-lib some of his presentation.
Many people in China do not watch videos hosted on servers outside of the country because the videos download or stream too slowly.
During politically sensitive periods, Internet speed becomes molasses-like, especially in Beijing. This happens every spring about the time of the annual legislative conclave in the nation’s capital.
During mass protests and violence, China can shut down access to the wider Internet in entire regions, forcing users to rely on a very limited Intranet. This was enacted for one year in Xinjiang after ethnic violence erupted there in 2009.
There is also extremely limited Internet access in some Chinese-ruled Tibetan areas where Tibetans have self-immolated to protest government policies.
In October last year, a report on Internet freedom by Freedom House, a US pro-democracy group, ranked China last among 65 nations, behind Iran, Cuba and Myanmar. (North Korea was not part of the report.)
China has been steadily falling in the rankings in the annual report. In 2014, it ranked third to last, ahead of Iran and Syria.
The report said that “over the past year, the renewed emphasis on information control led to acts of unconcealed aggression against Internet freedom.”
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