Saturday, June 09, 2007

Chinese Psychiatry and Internet Traffic for Blogs and Podcasts



I've been noticing lately that we get a lot of traffic from China. I guess that makes sense... it is only the most populous country on the planet. But, it is now clear that the internet has hit China in a big way. And opened its borders.

Above is a list of our podcast traffic for the first week in June. China is our #1 international source of hits. Most of these hits are image files (our logo) but there are quite a few podcast hits (though most are not completely downloaded). Most of the traffic comes from Baidu, which is China's version of Google. Baidu is, in fact, a competitor to Google, and is now China's Number One Son, accounting for 62% of all searchs in China.

While our podcast gets 500 hits per week from China, our blog gets no traffic from China. Zero. Not one single hit.

This suggests to me that China censors all Blogspot sites (or at least all the ones which might use the word psychiatry or mental), but they have no mechanism for blocking our audio content.

Of course, Psychiatry has had a difficult past in China. It has been used as a government tool for social and political control (I'm sure there are some in the anti-psychiatry movement who feel this way about American psychiatry). This 2005 article points out that raw capitalism may now be the dominant force in Chinese psychiatry now.

7 comments:

Dinah said...

I guess the next question is whether any of those Chinese people want to be my Facebook friends.

Roy said...

Poke 'em in the iChing.

Zoe Brain said...

iChing? That would be the (yarrow) stalk-ers profile, Neh?

ClinkShrink said...

All of Blogger is blocked in China. I vaguely recall once seeing a web site somewhere where you could test to see if your site was blocked. I put in Shrink Rap and it was verified as blocked.

Zoe Brain said...

Interesting that Australia holds such a high position too.
My blog isn't that influential! Neither do I download that much.

Sarebear said...

there's a little corner banner thing (a small strip that angles down over one corner of the blog) that says I've been banned in China! or something like that, that some bloggers use to point it out.

Or just make it seem like they're radical.

Yep, that's you three all right, you Segway-riding, duckie-bearing, psychiatrists, you. (I'm seeing a whole fleet of shrinks on segways bearing duckies, now; eeeee!)

Anonymous said...

A lot more info available here and in our related links:
http://www.rfa.org/english/china/2006/09/14/china_couch/
Luisetta Mudie, RFA Web editor, Jungian training candidate