Now that this dark chapter in Xinjiang’s history is behind us, I would like to take a step back and quickly analyze what effects – both good and bad – have resulted from this blockage and what China and the rest of the world should learn from this.

After 312 days of heavily restricted internet in Xinjiang – that’s 53 short of an entire year – it appears as if internet access has finally been restored.

Any email that is properly sent from within Xinjiang will come from Sina.com. In the future, this may be expanded to include other hosts but it is almost guaranteed that all of them will be based in China. In other words, if you have gmail…

On Monday it was reported by China Daily that that “Xinjiang [is] soon to be back online”. This optimistic statement was made by Nur Bekri, chairman of the Xinjiang government and the highest ranking Uyghur official. As much as I want to believe what he says…

No, the internet is still not completely opened. Everything has remained the same since earlier this month when 27 more sites were made available. Sites hosted within the province are still open and online banking has resumed. Email is…

I could have sworn I heard a collective groan last weekend as all the husbands in Xinjiang learned that Taobao, China’s largest online marketplace, was being restored (along with 27 other sites). Women everywhere raced to their computers ready to find the bargains they have been deprived of for the last six months. Unfortunately…

According to this China Daily article, limited email access has been restored to Xinjiang.  “Limited” means that supposedly we can send and receive emails…minus any attachments.

As of midnight last Friday, February 5th, it was announced that 27 more “outside Xinjiang” websites have been opened in addition to the four sites that were already accessible. After spending this past weekend searching over all these sites I can tell you that progress has been made, although each of them loads quite slowly. What’s more…

Everybody is intent on calling this an “internet restoration” but I believe it would be more accurate to refer to it as the “internet renovation”. Let me show you a few examples…

As of 12:01am this Sunday morning, January 17th, I am now able to send and receive text messages all over China for the first time in 6 months. The news was released as a one-sentence statement on the web but has been quickly forwarded all throughout the province via…can you guess?