Internet Censorship in China

By Los Angeles Chinese Learning Center

Also see unblock your website from China

Foreign visitors in China frequently complain to me that they could not access certain websites during their stay in China.  Indeed, certain news websites, websites related to certain religious organizations (most of them are illegal in China), as well as some pornographic websites are inaccessible from China.  Surprisingly enough, our website, the website of Los Angeles Chinese Learning Center at http://chinese-school.netfirms.com is also blocked by the Chinese government. (Through our recent efforts, the site has been unblocked by the Chinese government.  Currently, we are offering the service to unblock your website from China)

In a well researched paper titled "Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide" by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman from Harvard Law School tested approximately two hundred thousand websites by dial-up link and through proxy servers in China.  From May 2002 through November 2002, 19,032 websites rendered inaccessible.  These sites contained information about news, politics, health, commerce, and entertainment.  Please visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ for details.

After discovering that our website is inaccessible from China, we researched ways to contact authorities in China, hoping that they would offer us an explanation.  We were unable to find contact information for the Internet monitoring agency in China, however, we were lucky enough to have the email address of the secretary of Wen Jiabao, the premier of China. 

We explained our situation, and informed him about our organization.  A few days later, we noticed from our visitor logs that several IP addresses from China visited our site.  However, http://chinese-school.netfirms.com is still blocked by most regions of China, except occasionally and periodically, a few mysterious IP addresses from China show up on our logs.

A deeper research about our site's situation revealed that the inaccessibility of our site from China might be related to the fact that we are using a subdomain from netfirms.  All other sites with netfirms subdomain are inaccessible in China.  A few sites with netfirms subdomains contain information about religious groups that are illegal  in China.  There were a few times when our site was accessible in China in May 2004, so were other netfirms subdomain websites during those periods.

Chinese government seems to block websites (hosted by overseas Chinese) that contains information about Chinese culture.  An example is http://www.chinesetapes.com/ .  This site, as well as numerous others, has no information that might be deemed offensive to the Chinese government.

Allan Weaver wrote us a comment:

The tone of the text on http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/Internet-censorship.html suggest you are OK with the Chinese government blocking websites from its people. This prompts me to ask the question. If you like the Chinese censorship so much then why are you living in I.A [sic]?

Our reply:

We just removed the part that might cause misunderstandings to our positions.

Comment from Another Visitor Regarding Internet Censorship in China

To Allan:
Don't be an ass. Living in LA has nothing to do with Internet censorship. What do you know about Asian Americans or immigrants? For all you know, it is to teach ignorant fools like you some manners. You jolly well know that was a personal attack. Go fly your patriotism s*** elsewhere. Maybe try finding some nuclear weapon in Iraq.

I am more interested to learn about why China censor Internet information and perhaps there is another way to Internet regulation.

-Andrea

Our reply:

What happens when China tries to censor the Internet is that when they find a site "offensive", they block all the sites hosted on the server.  It's useless to give them suggestions or comments because they have their own system of reviewing their rules and regulations of the Internet.

We therefore offer the service of unblocking your website from China.  It's a guaranteed service.