主题：【原创】Lifestyle Defended -- pxpxpx

Once again, access to CCTHERE has been blocked by most Chinese ISPs.

Fond of this Chinese forum, many Netizens living behind the Great Firewall are furious and trying every way they could to regain the access including using VPN services, proxy servers, and even a tool developed by FLG despite the organization has long been denounced by the majority of this forum.

Although the main stream of this forum proved to be pro-government in many events, e.g. Tibet, Olympic, Xin Jiang, 64, Google, etc, it didn’t stop the same group of people choosing to fight Chinese government’s censorship aggressively once access to their own “spiritual homeland” is under threat.

One could wonder what they are defending.

Let’s make a short list here:

Share ideas with friends and foes;

Get the latest updates from those popular bloggers, sometimes referred as “Da Niu” (big cow);

Express own opinions on a variety of topics regarding China, world, history, economy, love, education, kids, and many more;

…

Many would call these human rights or freedom of speech.

I, on the other hand, would rather see them included in lifestyle.

Different to those could-be confusing and often controversial rights, lifestyle is simply a bundle of behaviors. Some of them could be rights and all of them merely pertain to the way a person lives.

Few would be naively thinking lifestyle should be solely determined by individual preferences. Laws and the society do have a call in many occasions. But when some once reasonable and normal behavior suddenly gets banned, people always wonder why and may choose to fight when explanations and reasoning are both absent. What just happened to CCTHERE members was no more than a recent example.

Regardless of their standings, many who made their ways to CCTHERE from the other end of the Great Firewall in the past several difficult days illustrated the universal strong disagreement with the censorship and determination of defending their own lifestyle, which make me wonder what the Great Firewall really protects and defends.

And is it really worthwhile?