Since those pesky flower-related “protests” a month ago, Gmail has been, let’s say, not working as well as it is in the U.S. What I, and most people who use it, had hoped would be temporary has stretched into a month of frustrating, erratic and worsening load times. Even with a proxy or VPN, Gmail just doesn’t work properly. Sometimes I can access the sign-in page with relative ease, other times I have to reload once, still other times I have to reload multiple times after a “page will not load” error message and wait a few (really, like 5+) minutes before I am able to get to my inbox. And then…more loading error messages, longer wait time to view e-mails, etc. And, yes, it has stopped me from checking my e-mail so much.

Anyway, a rundown of events since my last post on the subject:

• Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with its email services: “Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” said a Google spokesman. (Some interference is happening with its other services, such as maps and documents, too, though they were not mentioned directly.)
• The Chinese government has denied this and then refused to talk about it. According to the Guardian,

Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, told a regular news conference: “This is an unacceptable accusation.” She declined to comment further. The ministry of commerce and ministry of industry and information technology did not respond to faxed questions.

• At the time of the accusation and subsequent denial, GreatFirewall.biz, which tracks the effectiveness of the GFW, reported that the average download speed of Google was 34 kbps, or 45 times slower than that of QQ, China’s most popular instant messaging program, and 8 times slower than that of Yahoo. (Here’s the chart.)
• Today, Gmail is blocked. It was working yesterday, and blocked the day before.

Some insight from Richard Parris, an expert here in Beijing on computer systems and the Internet, in Josh Gartner’s podcast on what these latest “disruptions” mean about China’s Internet censorship capabilities:

…[W]hat we’re seeing is not just an address list that’s blocked, or not just servers names and keywords that are blocked, but what appears to be some kind of understanding of the service that is provided by the page. And specifically what we’re seeing that’s really changed is very wide scale blocking of things that may be used as communication tools, as rapid communication tools, of the Facebook/Twitter kind, that have been to various degrees hyped as playing a part in recent events in the Middle East, and other places.

It’s a bit disheartening that online censorship is the area in which China, so rarely seen as an innovator, actually does appear to be a leading innovator. Also disheartening is that the Chinese government has already written off social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter as threats and capable of bringing down the regime, while many people are still debating their actual roles in recent “revolutions” (see Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker last year, for example: “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted“).

To illustrate just how creepy the Google-China war is, Al Jazeera’s China correspondent, Melissa Chan, gives a detailed look at what may have been behind the hacking attacks on political activists that Google revealed on March 11. No details on where the attacks are coming from, but nevertheless, there appears to be a targeted effort to make various groups of people appear as agitators.