Why is there an alternative download page of python for China?

Question

On http://python.org there are two download pages, http://python.org/download/ for international users and http://python.org/getit/ for Chinese users.

When accessed from a country other than china, the second link redirects to the normal download page.

Why is that so?

Answer 1

As people have correctly guessed in the comments, the Great Firewall of China is to blame here. Martin v. Loewis clarifies this in Python-list, Python's general discussion list:

It's intentional. Notice that it goes to a different URL than the English download link.

Which is a synonym for the English download link (/getit is /download at present) Perhaps a translated page is planned?

No, translation is not the motivation at all.

Chinese readers will know when to use it.

Why a special link just for Chinese and not several other languages?

Because only Chinese users may have to bypass URL filters that selectively censor content from python.org. Let's see how long censors need to pick up this discussion and ban more of Python across the Great Firewall :-(

Regards, Martin

_{Source: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2011-March/599359.html}

The /getit url seems more like a proactive measure than anything else. If it gets blocked, then all python.org's administrators need to do is create another url for their Chinese users, without affecting any of their other users. Until of course the Chinese censors decide to block all of python.org. </sigh>