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Internet Censorship in China


Internet Censorship in China

Internet censorship is widely practiced in China, but does not apply to Hong Kong and Macau. In mainland China, pornographic and political sites are routinely blocked, and many other sites with a broad range of content are also subject to censorship of varying degrees. As of May 2010, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Angelfire, LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogspot, WordPress, Picasaweb, and Dropbox are all banned. Google, Wikitravel, Wikipedia, Flickr are available, although webpages that contain sensitive keywords will almost certainly trigger the censorship system, called the Golden Shield (金盾) (or euphemistically, the Great Firewall or GFW ) and result in the message "your connection is reset". The same sometimes goes for international news sites such as BBC, CNN, Reuters and The Economist. However as of March 2011 all of these sites are freely accessible. Censorship is often tightened during certain sensitive periods, such as the annual meeting of China's parliament in March, the CCP congress every fourth October, and anniversaries such as the National Day in October and the Tiananmen massacre in June. The simplest way to access blocked sites is to use a proxy server but even then, most sensitive political issues will be blocked as the contents are not encrypted. Other ways to bypass censorship include downloadable software such as Freegate, Tor and Psiphon . These introduce certain levels of encryption, and therefore so-called sensitive content can be seen. These should be downloaded before entering China as access to their official websites are blocked. A serious internet user may wish to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) which usually provides users with more stable and reliable access to banned websites for a fee starting from a few dollars per month. It is a legal offence to upload and submit any materials seen as subversive. However, regular internet users, especially English-speakers without political backgrounds, are usually free to write and send anything without problem. Certain companies like Yahoo have a track record of helping the government crackdown on political dissidents. In 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist in China, was imprisoned for ten years for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal Yahoo emails to the Chinese government.

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China Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.

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