Pinterest, the never-ending well of creativity, is now blocked in China.
Our eyes have been turned to many WeChat moments and chat flurries of outrage. Why would China block such an innocuous platform?
We’re just as angry as all the rest of moms (“And teachers!!” a few readers have pointed out), since the team at beijingkids also uses Pinterest to come up with cover ideas, layouts, and projects to try and review for readers.
We don’t know why exactly Pinterest has been blocked, since it’s been an unscathed source of inspiration, but our guess is that it has to do with Pinterest’s recent acquisition of Jelly Industries, a search-engine company. Jelly was co-founded by Biz Stone, which happened to also co-found Twitter and Medium. These platforms are also blocked in a sort of Chinese government boycott against Biz Stone’s belief that Chinese laws are “antithetical to [Twitter’s] whole way of doing things.”
The other possibility is that China is cracking down on foreign imports in ideology in strange ways. We don’t know why Pinterest would have been blocked to keep Western thought out, since from our knowledge, there weren’t many Chinese users of Pinterest.
But China’s recent blocking tirade is on full blast at the moment, with poor Peppa Pig books, among other foreign-published books for children, and South Korean group trips now also banned.
More stories by this author here.
Email: vanessajencks@truerun.com
Twitter: @vanessa_jencks
WeChat: vanessajencks
2 Comments
China has become a real isolation cell for me as an expat wife because I found out that a circle of what I thought were good friends back home, has begun to joke behind my back. My other half reassured me that things would be fine on his appointment to China, but this really caught me by surprise.
There is actually little that interests me here and besides a couple, lol the other expat wives I meet here, seem so shallow. Now this has been blocked, I have even less to do and as it is just about all the other sites that I had back home, are blocked. Can’t wait for the day to come when I can get out.
Hey Ggirl. I’m sorry to hear adjustment has been so rough. I hear you – I remember coming to Beijing and feeling so fed up with cultural pet peeves and pollution. I felt so depressed for a time. But now I’ve been here for 4 years, and I’ve come into contact with so many different types of people. My guess is that probably you should pursue here in China what you were passionate about back in your home country. For example, if that was knitting… I know a knitters club, if that was volunteering or exercising or singing, opportunities with these things abound, too. If you get involved in these passions, you’ll find other people who are passionate about this, too, finding a community of people here you connect with. You’re welcome to reach out to me personally via email at vanessajencks at truerun dot com.