Just catching up on the blogosphere from my hotel room at the Kerry Centre in Beijing. Unfortunately I can't read various specific blogs. Other web addresses seem fine, my Bloglines reader is accessible and I can read postings in the blocked blogs through my subscriptions at Bloglines. What the blocked blogs have in common is they are all hosted in the blogspot.com domain, i.e. they are run by Google using software from their acquisition of Blogger.com. Blogger.com (the software) is reachable but any reference to blogspot.com (the blogs) times out.
I knew there were problems in 2002-2005, but I thought China had gone to more fine-grained filtering of individual blogs, allowing access to the rest of Google's Blogger service. Of course I haven't paid a lot of attention - I'm only in China every couple of years - but I do skim Rebecca MacKinnon's RConversations which provides good coverage on censorship issues. However, Rebecca's recent discussions have focused on search engines kowtowing to the Chinese government, not wholesale blocking of blogspot.
The other thing I notice that different from 2003 is that all the readily available web proxies - those you can find with a simple Google search, even those that require a human to type a password - also appear to be blocked. Finally, the Google secure VPN client which I used once a few years ago, is now only available at a few locations in Mountain View.
I don't have a lot of time right now and I'm off to Singapore tomorrow, so that's it for experimentation on this trip.
I think China has been blocking all blogspot blogs for some time. I think because they are free they tend to have more overtly anti-China blogs.
Posted by: China Law Blog | June 19, 2006 at 10:09 PM
It's interesting that access to Bloglines.com is not restricted and yet, with Bloglines you can get all the content of any blog including blogspot blogs. You can also search for blogs and for specific content in blogs, and with a little care, you could subscribe through Bloglines w/o accessing a blog directly. This appears to be a loop hole in the current Chinese filters - a different kind of proxy if you will.
Posted by: brough | June 21, 2006 at 01:25 AM
China has engaged and continues to engage in all manner of Internet restrictions. I posted and interesting article and related link to the CECC on my blog here...You might want to check it out.
http://shadowdemocracy.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/the-china-you-will-see-is-not-the-china-that-is/
Posted by: Matthew Podoba | November 09, 2007 at 10:48 AM