China Blocks Google Site For Moving To Hong Kong | |||||||
Much of China was unable to access the Google site, which indicates a possibility that the Chinese government has chosen to punish the company for its decision last week to move out of Beijing and operate an uncensored site from Hong Kong.
Users were unable to do any search on the site, with few able to even access the home page. It was unclear whether the site had been shut down by Chinese censors or there was a glitch in the system. In either case, the widespread outage is seen as the Chinese Government’s retaliation to Google’s move to Hong Kong.
There have been no statements from Beijing, and this does not surprise analysts. The great Firewall of China – the country’s blocking system – is known to cut off access from sites that run afoul of Chinese administration.
After initially releasing a press note stating the disruption was possibly due to a change from their end, Google said that the change mentioned had been made a week ago, and the current disruption was from the Chinese end. It also added that the problem seemed to have been resolved and services had returned to normal.
Google is not the only site to face such a problem. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all been inaccessible here for much of last year. Because Beijing seemed to be angered by Google’s strident comments last week and in January about the country’s strict censorship controls, many analysts believed it was just a matter of time before China’s sophisticated Internet filters blocked the Google site.
Last week, citing frustration with Chinese censorship controls and online attacks that seemed to be coming from China, Google officially pulled its Chinese-language search engine out of the country and relocated it to Hong Kong, which still operates like an independent state. The move ended Google’s four-year experiment with operating a Chinese-language search engine from Beijing under Chinese censorship rules.
The question that remains is – how long will Beijing try to play a censorship role, until the access to free speech and thought one day bursts forth? And what the consequences of that will be, no one dares to bet on.
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