Thanks for your ideas. These methods you propose, as well as some others like writing Chinese in vertical, using russian characters, etc. have all one thing in common: they are ways to disguise the keywords to avoid them being found by a GSW automated search system. And they all have 2 inherent problems:

1- The search engines (google, etc.) also can’t find the keywords, so you miss potential readers.
2- If you get big enough, especially if you write in Chinese, then you get human intervention and all these tricks will not work.

But how automatic the GFW really is? I don’t know. The Chrter 08 post that got blocked here had been written a few weeks before with the same wording, but it only got blocked when the NYT linked to it (with a few hours lapse). So, clearly, the block is not just on keywords; the “hits” or “links” variable plays an important role as well.

The other option is: it was actually a human who followed the NYT link and gave the signal to put me on a “list”. In this case, my writing the keywords in Russian or in scanned pictures would have had no effect.

1) Writing the post and then scanning it to create an image file, maybe even hand-writing it to make it harder for a non-native speaker to read. Essentially your web page would look like a photo blog, but with scanned pictures of your writing. The content would not show up on a text keyword filter, and would require the censor to actual upload the page and read it to know its content. The only problem would be that it wouldn’t attract search-engine traffic, but blogs can be advertised in some other fashion, and the titles of the pictures would be searchable.

2) Like Pierre said, writing in some obscure half-forgotten language (like French) and then using an auto-translator to turn it into English – not exactly ideal as much of meaning/nuance would be lost, and some parts garbled, but better than nothing.

I think that the image-file method would be a particularly good method at least for a low-to-medium activity blog. Of course, once the censor actually gets around to reading your website (or just sees high-traffic ‘anti-China’ websites linking to it) the game would be up, but you would go much longer between blocks.

For myself, I’m happy to have my blog on good old blocked blogspot. There’s no pressure to avoid blockage when you’re already blocked!

I did not know Forward Logistic Group was that sensitive a topic in China

BTW, do you know if anyone writing in a language other than English and Chinese has ever been blocked ? Like in Spanish or French ? Or are we free to write home about la Paz Celestial en mille neuf cent quatre-vingt neuf because they don’t care ?

Here it is open again. Anybody out there who was blocked, let me know if this is useful, or add any other suggestion.