Blocking of coding site has Chinese programmers up in arms

Chinese censors might believe the Great Firewall is their best tool to block everything online that might threaten state security from outside. However, the wall has in fact become a powerful accelerator of social unrest within the country.

The latest group of mainlanders angered by the GFW is the software developer community, as their favourite code-sharing site, US-based GitHub, has been blocked since Monday afternoon.

It is still unclear why mainland authorities blocked GitHub, but the reaction to its blocking was strong enough to trigger a massive outcry from programmers, the most severe since Google closed its Chinese search service on the mainland in 2010.

Kai-Fu Lee, a former president of Google China and now the chief executive of his own venture capital firm, condemned the censorship of GitHub last night on Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like social media site.

He said the blocking of the coding site would make it harder for Chinese programmers to connect with overseas IT communities and would end up damaging their competitiveness and limiting their vision.

“GitHub has neither ideological nor anti-government content on it, there was no reason to block a site like that,” Lee said in the post, which has spawned more than 70,000 retweets and 15,100 comments in 15 hours.

However, Thomas Yao, founder of a popular Chinese GitHub-like site, disagreed with Lee, accusing bloggers of stupidly straying from site’s intended technology-based content and discussions, and thereby causing the site to be blocked.