Dec 21 2008
nytimes not appearing china… what did you expect?
A long overdue weekend review. So it seems like the great firewall is working again, and this time, its the New York Times that has some sort of technical glitches that won’t allow it to show up in China again. From CNET yesterday:
Chinese authorities have begun blocking access from mainland China to the Web site of The New York Times even while lifting some of the restrictions they had recently imposed on the Web sites of other media outlets.
When computer users in cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou tried to connect on Friday morning local time to NYTimes.com, they received a message that the site was not available; some users were cut off on Thursday as early as 8 p.m. The blocking was still in effect on Saturday morning.
Chinese officials had few explanations for the restriction on the Times site. “Concerning your particular question, we’re not really familiar with the details,” said a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, who declined to give his name. “Web site maintenance is not within the job purview of the Foreign Ministry.”
Tang Rui, an official with the government’s International Press Center in Beijing, said he also had no specific information. “It might be a technical problem,” he said, declining to elaborate.
In the months leading up to the Olympics in Beijing, during the Games and immediately after, the Chinese government temporarily unblocked access to some Web sites and eased curbs on the ability of foreign correspondents to travel within China. It has not tightened the travel restrictions since then.
So China is cracking down on “free” internet usage again. To be honest, I am actually surprised it lasted this long… I thought it would be may be 2 months or so, and then that’s it, the clamp comes down. Well, it went a little longer than I expected, so I am willing to count this as a good thing overall.
I’m pretty darn certain its not a technical glitch. The NY Times site seems to work for me just fine. (and probably all over the world too except for one rather significant “outage”) But honestly, what did you expect? I don’t think anyone figured that the Olympics would mean that China would allow free and unfettered piping in of western propaganda and media… and it was only a matter of time before it happened again. So pardon me if I don’t run around and act like its a big deal… and yawn instead. My thought: just get used to it because it was bound to happen.
