China Blocking Key Foreign Media Sites 03/06/2009 by Intellectual Property Watch 3 Comments Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)China is blocking its citizens’ access to leading international social media and news websites in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square anti-democracy massacre in Beijing. Media and information sharing sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and Flickr as well as mainstream media such as the Financial Times, New York Times and BBC have become inaccessible in the country, according to several news sources. The Financial Times reports that foreign newspapers and broadcasts are also being blocked, including their own latest issue, which contains an interview with a prominent Tiananmen Square dissident. And the New York Times reports that several political activists have been jailed in recent days, including Wu Gaoxing, who had recently released a letter saying former prisoners had been singled out long after their sentences had ended. Herdict, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that aggregates user information about site accessibility on the web, is keeping tabs on reports of unavailable sites in China. Their list also reports that the websites of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tor Project (which protects online anonymity), and Amnesty International, and several others, are also unavailable. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related "China Blocking Key Foreign Media Sites" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
est says 04/06/2009 at 4:18 am NYT, FT & BBC is accessible, but who cares about their daily China-bashing article? Reply
Sandra Lee Smith says 19/01/2010 at 3:27 am I have a friend in Shanghai who told me her Blogger accounts have been cut off by the Chinese government, even though she isn’t Chinese, but went there to teach English. She also told me, in personal e-mails, that searches in China are strictly curtailed, which recent news about the breach at Google confirms. And it’s coming out that the Chinese practices toward foreign, multinational companies and foreign employees going there, to help open that market to the world are not being treated fairly by the Chinese government as well. China isn’t even living up to trade agreements signed years ago, yet. It makes me wonder seriously if we, the rest of the world aren’t making a large mistake by not demanding in a united front that China toe the same mark as everyone else or get out of the trade union! Reply
Dr. Amy Eisenberg says 21/01/2010 at 7:14 am China must not be above international law as a member of the Security Council of the United Nations. As an International Expert in China at the Research Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Jishou University, the Chinese government officers entered my apartment without my permission and meddled with our computers. We were not permitted to publish anything in China without their permission! They breached contract on a number of occasions and did not honor our international work agreement. I found the authorities to be unethical and dishonest unfortunately. Corruption is rampant in autonomous regions of China and environmental degradation is severe. Dr. Amy Eisenberg International Society of Ethnobiology Reply