The Google.com search engine could no longer be accessed in most provinces in China, according to Reporters Without Borders, from May 31 to about June 6. Also, software designed in the United States to get round censorship only worked with great difficulty, according to a June 6 news release by Reporters Without Borders. However, Reporters Without Borders reported Friday, June 9, that Chinese authorities "seem to have stopped blocking access to the international version of Google's search engine, Google.com."
During the interlude, the Chinese Internet users were restricted to the censored version of the Google search engine, Google.cn. Last January, the censored version, Google.cn, was launched in compliance with the dictates of the Chinese communist regime. Since then, gradually Chinese Internet users found it harder to access the international version of Google, which is Google.com, until the search engine was totally inaccessible throughout the country on May 31. The blockade was extended to Google News and Google Mail as well.
Tests carried out by Reporters Without Borders show that Google.Com is again accessible in at least Beijing and Shanghai.
One explanation offered by Reporters Without Borders for the sudden reversal is that the online censorship was stepped up during the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June.
Reporters Without Borders, asserted, "It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content."
Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin expressed regret on June 6 about complying with Chinese censorship and suggested the possibility of rejecting Chinese censorship and pulling out if necessary. However, one day or two later, Brin said, "That's an alternative path. It's not the one we've chosen to take right now," according to Reuters (June 8).
The censorship imposed by Google can produce startling results. "A Chinese user looking for photographs of Tiananmen Square sees images of attractive buildings and smiling tourists, while American Google users get photos of Chinese tanks used to disperse pro-democracy protestors in 1989," said the Boston Globe (Jan 28, 2006).
The Chinese communist regime has always kept a tight lid on the other media—newspapers, television, and books. Their control of these media had been nearly total, but when the Internet came along in the 1990s, the Communist regime could not control it in the same way. Chinese Internet users circumvented the censors by employing proxy networks, which act as portals to the sites and allow users to hide the IP address of their computer. Most experts said two years ago that the Communist state was losing the battle of controlling the Internet.
But today the China censorships are winning the battle of the Internet in China. Software companies such as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate, and Garden Networks, used by thousands of the Mainland Chinese Internet users to get around China's "Great Firewall" and acquire news and information from outside of China, are losing the battle. This is isolating China from the worldwide Internet.
The creator of Dynapass, Bill Xia, who is exiled in the US, stated these unprecedented successes of the regime probably means that the Chinese authorities are expending considerable resources to block his programs and the others.
Based on information filtered from the Internet users in China, the software engineers living abroad have been trying to fight back. The effectiveness of the new version of Dynapass is still limited, according to Reporters Without Borders.
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