Banned in China: what the regime doesn't want its people to see

Google’s threat yesterday to stop censoring search results on its Google.cn site raises the question of just what the regime is censoring. As we reported yesterday, China has increasingly sophisticated tools – known as the ‘Golden Shield’ or the ‘Great Firewall of China’ – available to monitor and limit web traffic. The sites that are blocked vary over time but there are some common themes.

Banned in China: a picture showing a protestor in Tiananmen Square in 1989

Photos

Certain images are blocked for Chinese internet users. Usually the pictures show protests and they are often quite graphic. Images of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 are blocked, for example, as are images of protests in Tibet and pictures of Falun Gong members who have been tortured by the regime.

Search terms
Many search keywords are blocked in China. Searches for “Falun Gong”, “Free Tibet” and “Tiananmen” are routinely cut off. Searches for terms such as “Democracy” and “Human rights” will also fail to deliver results. Google.cn would display the following message for such searches: “According to local laws, regulations and policies, part of the searching result is not shown.”

ISPs
Internet service providers in China routinely limit the sites that their customers can access so as not to be found liable for their conduct. Politically sensitive messages are often deleted from forums by moderators employed by the ISPs.

Western websites
Websites are regularly blocked for a period of time and later unblocked when the regime relents. The New York Times, Wikipedia, the BBC and Amnesty International are just some of the sites that have been blocked at one time or another. Last year it was reported that many social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, were being blocked by the Chinese government. Apple’s music store, iTunes, was blocked during the 2008 Olympics after more than 40 athletes downloaded a pro-Tibet album.

iPhone applications
At the end of last year it was reported that several iPhone and iPod Touch applications relating to the Dalai Lama had been removed from the Chinese version of the iTunes App Store. Apps including Dalai Lama Quotes and the Dalai Lama Prayerwheel are not available to Chinese iPhone users. Apple said: “We continue to comply with local laws”.

There is much more that is blocked by the Great Firewall of China. However, the good news is that it is a fairly trivial matter to circumvent the censorship and doing so is widely tolerated. Nevertheless, by making it inconvenient to access controversial material the Chinese regime is still keeping many of its 360 million internet users in the dark.