China Blocks YouTube, Again

cryfreedomlove brings news that YouTube has once again been blocked in China. The Google-owned video site was censored in China last year because of videos about the protests in Tibet, and that may be the impetus behind this latest restriction. According to a New York Times report, "'The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,' said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley... Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable."

Re:Great firewall of... wtf?

[sakdoctor]

Youtube isn't globally popular:
http://www.youku.com/ [youku.com]

Facebook isn't globally popular:
http://www.zhanzuo.com/ [zhanzuo.com]

MSN messenger isn't globally popular:
http://www.qq.com/ [qq.com]

And in fact there is a cloned super-sanitized version of every web service that exists, so the majority of people just don't notice or even care.

Re:first

[commodore64_love]

I'm surprised this story is about China and not the UK. I guess it's only a matter of time - "UK Blocks Wikipedia" has already happened.

Re:Typical for an American to think...

[MetaPhyzx]

That would be Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened up Japan by threat of force.

I wasn't sure if you were just trying to be funny...

Re:Tiananmen Square

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also worth remembering that the '89 Tiananmen square demo was almost exactly 70 years after the previous Tiananmen square student demo. And the earlier one was the first public action by the movement that fomented the communist revolution.

So you can see why the Chinese govt was a bit edgy.

Chinese have many ways getting around censorhsip

[masupra]

What got censored are only those official news/reports/articles. If you live in China and surf the web, you'll know that almost any information can be published in an alternative way, and the government is doing nothing about it. Just take one example, 'Tiananmen Massacre' or '6.4'(the date it happened) is banned, but you can always use something like 8^8 to say 6.4 in another way, and every Chinese reading the post knows what it means. Or you can Acronym of Pinyin for a word, such as ZF for 'government', GCD for 'Communist Party', FLG for 'Fa Lun Gong', etc. I am a Chinese working in the US and I post on popular Chinese web sites almost every day for all contents I want, never a problem. The key is, you have to understand the culture background to get around the censorship. Getting blocked by posting 'let's over throw the communist party' in plain English or Chinese only shows you lack the basic common sense to deal with censorship, which is a skill many Chinese are good at. An added benefit of censorship is it makes people very skeptical and critical on whatever is being reported by media. While I found many American blindly believe what was reported by BBC/CNN/NYT, most Chinese take the news report with a huge grain of salt. That is why CCTV of China is officially called CCAV (adult video) by many Chinese citizens. As a Chinese who has deep root and understanding with China's culture and current development, what I want to clarify is, most Chinese don't care about censorship. Because most ordinary Chinese only cares about economy (like most people in other countries do). The current law and policies in China offers relatively fair and open environment to most citizens. People have no right for direct vote, but you can mostly joke around most political stuff without the worry of being thrown into jail (if you know how people call Hu Jintao 'bro Hu', Wen Jiabao 'baby' in his face (bao can mean baby in Chinese), that's enough for most people -- even in America, with so many Bush haters, they only provide lip service, how many of the Bush haters actually sued him in court or draw a gun and start shooting in Crawford? I often found Westerners have a laughable and condescending view upon China. They tend to think Chinese government is evil and Chinese people are stupid, they label all Chinese people who don't agree with them as 'brainwashed', they refuse to call the Muslims who blew buses packed with innocent people terrorists simply because they are against Chinese government, and they foolishly believe Dalai Lama is a peace lover even he never apologized for his past as a slave owner and was on CIA payroll for more than 20 years (as a slave owner in Tibet you can legally kill a slave and use his skull as a bowl). btw you don't get killed by having the same name with the emperor, but you do need to change your name. It is a tradition in ancient China that emperors use very rare words as their names so most people don't have to worry about this kind of 'naming collision'