China’s Communist leadership says Google and other Internet companies will have to abide by its laws, including Web restrictions, if they want to do business in the country.
China has increased its Internet filtering efforts, blocking nearly all access to Google’s international search engine and making it far more difficult to get around government censors using U.S.-designed software, free press advocates say.
The Google.com search engine has been blocked in most parts of China, as Beijing steps up its efforts to restrict the public’s access to information, a Paris-based media watchdog said.
While the censored Chinese version of the Google search engine, Google.cn, is easily accessible, its international version, Google.com, is no longer available to people living in most Chinese provinces, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement released.
Random attempts to access Google.com in Beijing appeared to confirm that the international version of the search engine had indeed been made unavailable, while the censored Chinese-language version, Google.cn, was still accessible. Google.cn was launched in January amid much controversy because the company agreed to censor its service according to the wishes of China’s propaganda chiefs.
The statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry recently came after a Google co-founder expressed doubts about his company’s decision to offer a self-censored version of its search engine so it could operate in China.
The Chinese version of Google offered in this country gives access only to sites that do not contain what the government considers politically sensitive material.
Google users this week reported the general, uncensored version of the search engine was blocked in many parts of China. Analysts speculated the blocking might be due to the sensitive June 4 anniversary of the Chinese army’s bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. “The government traditionally takes extra steps to prevent politically sensitive activities around the anniversary.”
Officials with the Mountain View, Calif., company were not immediately available for comment. But co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters in Washington, D.C., that the company has had to compromise on its principles in order to operate in China, according to a report from the Associated Press.
We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference, Brin said, according to the AP.
Company officials have said they would monitor conditions in China before deciding whether to keep doing business in the country. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao offered no hope that Beijing might soften its policy of Internet censorship.
"Any cooperation on economy and trade should be conducted with the framework of the law," Liu says. "We also hope relevant companies operating and developing business in China can abide by Chinese law."
Aside from the Google.com search engine, Reporters Without Borders said the blocking was being gradually extended to the Google News and Google Mail services. “Google has just definitively joined the club of western companies that comply with online censorship in China,” Reporters Without Borders said. “It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content.”
China routinely blocks thousands of Internet sites, including VOA’s Web site, in an effort to control public access to information that is critical of the government. The Chinese government employs thousands of people to monitor the Internet, including e-mail, looking for material considered subversive.
GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA
Foreign websites covering politics and sensitive issues are blocked by Chinese internet providers face strict censorship Websites, forums and blogs must officially register and are monitored China’s internet ‘police’ thought to number 50,000 censors.
A Beijing-based Google spokeswoman said the company was looking into the apparent effort to block its most widely used search engine, but declined any other comment. “We launched an investigation last week,” spokeswoman Cui Jin said. “As long as we do not have more certain information, it would be irresponsible for us to comment more.”
Reporters Without Borders also said the Chinese authorities had largely managed to neutralize software designed to sidestep censorship since late May.
Software such as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate and Garden Networks is normally used to gain access to news and information that is blocked by the firewall isolating China from the rest of the worldwide web. Bill Xia, the US-based exile who created Dynapass, said the jamming of these programs had reached “an unprecedented level” and he was convinced the authorities were deploying considerable resources to achieve it.
Software engineers based abroad have had very limited success in updating the programs on the basis of information they have received from Internet users inside China, the advocacy group said.
In addition to Google, US companies Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco Systems have also been accused of accommodating China’s demands on censorship in return for access to its huge internet market.
Content considered to be a threat includes references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and notable dissidents, is blocked. Chinese authorities have also stepped up measures against software designed to bypass internet censorship, the Reporters Without Borders statement said.
The Chinese government’s internet filtering is some of the most sophisticated in the world.