China has shut-down many frequently used applications such as Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, Livejournal, Tumblr, the Huffington Post, Microsoft's Live.com, Hotmail, its MSN Space blog tool, its new search engine Bing and others just before events marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship - to put it mildly - on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which exists outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However on June 2, Chinese authorities have come down like a tonne of bricks on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com, its MSN Space blog tooll, Blogger, LiveJournal, the Huffington Post and a number of other sites. And that’s no joke, given that we’re talking about the Great Wall of China here.
A number of foreign-based sites that have hosted Chinese bloggers, including blogspot.com and the Chinese-language version of wordpress.com, have also been blocked in recent weeks.
The South China Morning Post, an English language newspaper based in Hong Kong that has frequently featured articles on Tiananmen and other sensitive issues, has also seen its distribution on the Chinese mainland curbed in advance of the anniversary on Thursday. And some Beijing readers of last weekend’s edition of The International Herald Tribune discovered that an inside page of the newspaper with an article on the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, was missing.
In recent days, the government has detained a number of political dissidents seen as threats to public order during the anniversary period, including one who had released an open letter complaining about economic hardship visited on former Tiananmen demonstrators who were jailed after the crackdown.
The dissident, Wu Gaoxing, was seized Saturday [May 30] at his home in Taizhou, a coastal city south of Shanghai, according to the New York advocacy group Human Rights in China. Mr. Wu was among five men, all once jailed for their roles in the Tiananmen movement, who released a letter last weekend charging that former prisoners have been singled out for economic hardship long after their prison terms ended.
Human Rights in China said Mr. Wu was taken away and his computer confiscated about an hour after the letter, addressed to President Hu Jintao and other senior leaders, became public.
Mr. Wu, a writer and former educator, was taken into custody in 1989 and imprisoned for two years after he joined protests in his home province of Zhejiang against the military crackdown on Tiananmen demonstrators. “In this society that claims to be harmonious, we have become ‘citizens of the three have-nots waiting to die’: we have no regular jobs, no pensions, and no health insurance; if we get sick, we can only wait to die, and all this just because 20 years ago we were sentenced for political reasons,” the letter says.
The men, among them a former Communist Party member and a factory worker, said they had been denied pensions, health care and regular employment since taking part in local rallies that were inspired by the protests in Beijing. One of the signers, Mao Guoliang, said he had been fired from 17 schools since he served a four-year term for “counterrevolutionary activities.”
Some Readers Comments:
Miss Xu: Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.
Kaiser Kuo: a Chinese-American writer and consultant in Beijing working with Youku told me via direct message after the system shut down completely using a VPN (which, like proxies, are commonplace in China) that “My only surprise in this matter is that it took ‘em so long.”
Ryan McLaughlin: an ex-pat American writer and web designer/developer based outside Beijing, said [updated:] that VPNs, which many Chinese use to get around the Great Firewall, are not being affected by the shutdown. He also blogs “Undoubtedly the blocks are in an effort to curb online commentary and the dissemination of information about the [Tiananmen Massacre], which on [June 4] celebrates its 20th anniversary.”
Mimi Xu, a China/San Francisco based product dev and entrepreneur who Tweets as MissXu, summed it up: “The 3 web services I cant live without - Twitter, Flickr, YouTube - are all blocked in China."
Sources:
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/06/02/china-shuts-down-twitter-and-bing-in-lead-up-to-tiananmen-anniversary/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,524339,00.html?test=latestnews
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/world/asia/03china.html?ref=technology