i don't get what it is with china and the internet. i suppose that when you have a billion people living in a traditional, suppressed country where censorship is required to perpetuate the government's control over its populace, you are bound to get some unexpected consequences.
case in point - starting a few weeks ago, traffic to my website tripled! this is really great news, because my revenue from Google AdSense has gone up from $0.12 per month to a staggering $0.45 per month (any time now, i'm planning on handing in my resignation from my day job)!!! i wanted to know why i should be the happy recipient of such mad fame! i mean, was it the fact that i posted like 15 posts in all of 2009, versus like 60 in 2008? maybe the scarcity of my posts was directly proportional to the number of visitors i received? i track my traffic with Google Analytics, so i went to it to figure out why my traffic levelled up so significantly.
it turns out that i get about 35 visits a day from china and they are all coming to my site for the same reason - "gay". that's right. the top keyword reference that leads to my website is "gay". all the "gay" on my website is currently accounting for over 80% of all the traffic to my website, overwhelming the previous main topics that drive traffic to my site, "canada's wonderland" and "adam hughes". and when i view all of the blog posts that i've created with the tag "gay" in them, there in an astronomical ONE post that i wrote about in 2007 about the gay pride parade. so seriously? that qualifies me as a global expert/authority of gay life? one post? it actually makes me feel kind of bad that i only have one article on "gay" rather than a whole bunch!
all of these hits from all across china come from one site: baidu.com. baidu.com is like google for china (which is fitting, considering google and china are somewhat at war lately) and accordingly, the results that it serves are highly censored and according to the China Digital Times (via Wikipedia) "Baidu has a long history of being the most proactive and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu's internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search". on the one hand, i'm pleased to not be on Baidu's blocked list, but on the other hand, it's a little disconcerting to know that the chinese government considers me to only have value as an inoffensive western homosexual.
i don't even know what to think of this. i've had a web presence since 1995, and while i'm definitely gay-friendly/positive, i'm also as assuredly not gay! there was a time in history not so long ago, where association with certain groups - in fact the mere suggestion that you were - would significantly fuck your life over. i think that the potential for a resurgence of that kind of associative hysteria is supremely low these days, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility, especially as china ascends to a pre-eminent role in the global economy… and more intimately, since i have to go to china for a good friend's wedding!
so what posture does one assume, being armed with this knowledge and warned by these lessons from the past? well, i suppose my response is to be proud that my positive attitude is being broadcast to an inquisitive new audience. my response is to be vocal about the importance of the exchange of ideas and encouragement of tolerance and love towards others. my response is to say that i'm okay with china believing that i'm gay, because it doesn't matter to me what strangers think, and moreover, i don't date asians (my own form of internal bigotry that i'm content to suffer insults over). and finally, my response is to double the number of blog posts that i have tagged with the tag "gay"!
i hope you enjoyed this post, china. i'm sure this isn't what you came to my site to read. i now fully expect my traffic to dwindle back to its original trickle since baidu.com will almost certainly blacklist me once it indexes this!
- g
song of the day for discovering your identity is being subverted: people are people, depeche mode.
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