The Internet in China
Stop Your Searching
The Economist
September 5, 2002

What greets Chinese surfers today at www.google.com

Censors clamp down on foreign helpers

CHINA'S industrious Internet censors have hit on a new tactic. Until last week, they had focused on blocking access to websites containing material deemed inimical to the Chinese Communist Party. Now they are targeting search-engines that might lead users to such material. Two Californian search-engines—Google and AltaVista—can no longer be accessed through Chinese internet providers.

Google is particularly popular in China because of its ability to search for pages in simplified Chinese characters. Altavista also has a Chinese-language capability, but Google not only provides links to web pages, but also to copies of those pages stored on Google's computers. Even if a server is blocked, its content can sometimes still be read.

China has its own search engines, but they do not provide access to web pages stored outside the country. The government would be far happier if foreign search engines followed the example of Yahoo!, an American company whose Chinese search facilities offer sanitised results. A search on Yahoo! in simplified Chinese for the banned Falun Gong sect found only one web site, that of an anti-Falun Gong group, together with more than 180 news items culled from the official Chinese media. This year Yahoo! signed a pledge circulated by China's government-backed Internet Society which commits signatories not to disseminate information that might threaten state security or social stability.

The authorities are becoming particularly worried about possible threats to stability in the run-up to the Communist Party congress in November, an event which this year will involve extensive leadership changes. The party does not want disaffected groups such as Falun Gong stirring up trouble. Determined users in China, though, will always find ways of skirting around controls. There are ways into Google other than by typing in the regular www.google.com for instance, by using a numerical address.

An American think-tank, RAND, published a report last week on the Internet in China. It said that while China has done a remarkable job of finding counter-strategies to what it sees as the negative effects of the e-revolution, time is on the side of its opponents.

The Search Goes On
The Economist
September 19, 2002

China backtracks on banning Google—up to a point

IN CHINESE, the nickname for Google, an American Internet search engine, is gougou, meaning “doggy”. For the country's fast-growing population of Internet users (46m, according to an official estimate), it is proving an elusive creature. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities blocked access to Google from Internet service providers in China—apparently because the search engine helped Chinese users to get access to forbidden sites. Now, after an outcry from those users, access has been restored.

An unusual climbdown by China's zealous Internet censors? Hardly. More sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to use Google to search for material deemed offensive to the government. Access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by Google as it trawls the Internet. These once provided a handy way for Chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites.

After the blocking of Google on August 31st, many Chinese Internet users posted messages on bulletin boards in China protesting against the move. Their anger was again aroused last week when some Chinese Internet providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked Google site to far less powerful search engines in China.

Duncan Clark, the head of a Beijing-based technology consultancy firm, BDA (China) Ltd, says China is trying a new tactic in its efforts to censor the Internet. Until recently, it had focused on blocking individual sites, including all pages stored on them. Now it seems to be filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key words that might indicate undesirable content. For example earlier this week when using Eastnet, a Beijing-based Internet provider, a search on Google for Falun Gong—a quasi-Buddhist exercise sect outlawed in China—usually aborted before all the results had time to appear. Such a search also rendered Google impossible to use for several minutes.