Globe and Mail: Google's back in China, sort of

Friday, September 13, 2002

(Clearwisdom.net) Beijing - China has restored access to the popular search engine Google, but is still blocking Internet users from content it deems politically taboo as part of a media crackdown ahead of November's pivotal Communist Party congress.

Another search engine, California-based AltaVista, remained blocked on Friday, and the Chinese government appeared to be still barring Google searches on topics it regards as sensitive.

A spokeswoman for Google, which is also based in California, said the company had heard from Chinese users that they were again able to access its site 10 days after Beijing, gearing up for the key congress, blocked it.

But on Friday, Chinese surfers could not open Web links appearing under sensitive search topics such as Tibet, President Jiang Zemin, his likely successor Hu Jintao, or Chinese democracy activists.

Searches for the [persecuted] spiritual movement Falun Gong have been blocked altogether ahead of the Nov. 8 Congress at which Mr. Jiang is expected to begin handing over power to a new generation of leaders.

Some users who tried searches for Falun Gong also found their service on Google - popular among China's 45 million Internet users for its ability to conduct Chinese-language searches - disabled briefly.

Analysts said China, under criticism from its millions of Google users and rights groups abroad, was using software to sift Google material entering China through its Internet gateways and was no longer blocking Google and routing users to local sites.

"Rather than stopping things going out, they've switched to filtering things coming back in," said Duncan Clark, head of Beijing-based tech consultancy BDA China Ltd.

"It might not be completely consistent," he said.

Measures like the all-out block on Falun Gong, accused of threatening Communist Party rule, were a clue to leaders' sensitivities ahead of the five-yearly congress where Jiang is expected to retire in a major reshuffle, Clark said.

"It's to some extent a gauge of how the winds are blowing," he said.

But it remained unclear how long China could continue its selective censoring of Google given the big costs in manpower and band width to ensure nationwide compliance.

"We may be talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year," said Mr. Clark.

The filtering of Google may also reflect increasing Internet surveillance in China, which has detained users for posting material on democracy and the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown.

In March, about 130 major Web portals operating in China took a government-issued self-censorship pledge to promote healthy competition, deal squarely with consumers - and observe the ban on a familiar list of touchy topics.

Rights groups and advocates of free speech called it a step backward for freedom of expression, and some criticized the signatories - said to include Yahoo Inc.

China also restricts access to several foreign news sites and often forces domestic sites to remove content deemed unacceptable.

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