China Reinstates Wikipedia Ban

Rob T Firefly writes "The International Herald Tribute reports that the lifting of China's Wikipedia ban earlier this week was short-lived. Wikipedia is once again inaccessible from behind the Great Firewall, along with all other Wikimedia projects. Additionally, the URL of Chinese Wikipedia is once again a banned search term. No reason has yet been given for any of it." From the article: "It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information Industry did not immediately respond when contacted for comment Friday. Beijing blocked access to the English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia in October last year, apparently out of concern about entries touching on the country's sensitive spots -- Tibet, Taiwan and other topics."

Reflects the Politics in Beijing

In Beijing you have the conservatives and the hard-line conservatives duking it out for control. When policy changes it's because one side has momentarily gained the upper hand, or believed they had, and ordered the change.

Re:Reflects the Politics in Beijing

When policy changes it's because one side has momentarily gained the upper hand, or believed they had, and ordered the change.

I really have no understanding of how policy is set in China, but I might be able to believe that if Wikipedia was accessible for a month or two, but a major blocking policy like this changing over a few days seems a bit insane. Is there really no one in charge over there that makes decisions that last more than a few days? How the hell can you run a country like that?

Since the change from block->no-block->block was all so abrupt I'd say it's more likely that this was just either a technical glitch in the firewall, or a deliberate attempt at trying to perpetuate the belief inside China that there IS no official censorship and it's all just "trouble contacting some sites".

Re:Reflects the Politics in Beijing

I might be able to believe that if Wikipedia was accessible for a month or two, but a major blocking policy like this changing over a few days seems a bit insane.

This pattern of behavior was played out on a much larger scale early on in PRC history: the Hundred Flowers Campaign [wikipedia.org] followed by the Anti-Rightist Movement [wikipedia.org]. The pattern is: open up and seemingly liberalize communications for a brief period; then, once everyone who criticizes the government identifies themselves, you go clean them up. Pretty straightforward.

Re:

The pattern is: open up and seemingly liberalize communications for a brief period; then, once everyone who criticizes the government identifies themselves, you go clean them up


Hmm.. It's an interesting theory, but it doesn't sound very plausible. If you

Re:Reflects Politics as a whole more like

And the reason for the US invasion of Iraq or Afganistan was US citizens genuinely fearing for their lives?

Please be serious, every ruling class has their own agenda and they very rarely tell the people they rule.

Re:

Communism is a liberal ideal; not a conservative ideal. Waaaaay on the other side of the political spectrum from conservatism is communism.

If someone is a conservative, they are working to CONSERVE the status quo. So in China, the Communists are conservat

Could be....

Could be a "technical" problem...

Re:Could be....

And the people pounding on the doors of avid Chinese wiki users could be Avon ladies.

Re:Could be....

Chinese Gov: What? You mean you can't access the site? Oh we're terribly sorry, there must be a technical problem. We have identified the problem and we are working on it. Expect to be back on Wikipedia in six to eight years.

Technical Glitches

It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches

My guess is that it was accessible due to technical glitches.

How about adding a million glitches

Everyone run a proxy.

 

Wikinews link

Here [wikinews.org] is the Wikinews link I referred to in the submission. I hadn't found the AP article yet.

Never ascribe to malice...

...that which can be explained by incompetence.

Whether the earlier opening up or this latest blocking is on purpose I don't think we'll know. According to the Chinese delegate to the conference in Greece two weeks ago no sites are blocked.

Re:Never ascribe to malice...

"According to the Chinese delegate to the conference in Greece two weeks ago no sites are blocked."

Wow, China is more liberal with the internet than my employer. Maybe I'll move there, I hear Tiananmen Square is lovely in June.

Re:Never ascribe to malice...

" According to the Chinese delegate to the conference in Greece two weeks ago no sites are blocked."

The same delegate would also be glad to tell you of China's wonderful human rights record, how much Chinese occupation has improved Tibet, and how China is democratic.

Re:

" According to the Chinese delegate to the conference in Greece two weeks ago no sites are blocked."
The same delegate would also be glad to tell you of China's wonderful human rights record, how much Chinese occupation has improved Tibet, and how China is

Re:

"And how they've always been at war with Oceania."

Pretty hard to do without a navy.

Re:

The Chinese have a navy. It's just very quiet. [google.com]

Re:

"According to the Chinese delegate to the conference in Greece two weeks ago no sites are blocked."

Dishonesty like that just amaze. Who do they think they are fooling? To say something like that with a straight face you have to put no value on truth and ho

pool's over

alright, you heard him, pool's over. who had 2 days?

Excellent tactic

Let the ban lapse so all the free thinkers and government detractors can post on a popular site, then ban it one week later... sounds like they wanted an easy way to find out who to arrest next!

Too much vandalism

Looks like they were vandalizing it by replacing all of the text with ?'s anyways...

Searching vs typing in URL?

Its says you can't search for it anymore, but does that mean you can't go directly to the site?

I know many non-techie users can't wrap their heads around typing in URLs to go directly to the site without a Google or MSN search, but you'd think they'd block

Re:Searching vs typing in URL?

According to Wikinews, searching from within China on any non-Chinese search engine (including the English-language Google, Yahoo, and MSN you know and/or love) for the string "zh.wikipedia.org" will apparently get you banned from viewing that search engine for several minutes. I imagine this is to stop people finding references to the blocked site and discussions of its' blocking (like we are now) just as much as it is to discourage people using things like Google's cache to see the blocked material.

Re:

i'm in shanghai on china telecoms adsl line, wikipedia is blocked for me, and it was going so well :( i used it for creative research almost hourly..

back to tor i guess

Accordign to Google.....

They haven't blocked it:

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid =57869 [ucla.edu] (posted at 2:18 PM EST)
http://www.toptechnews.com/news/China-Abandons-Wik ipedia-Censorship/story.xhtml?story_id=101009A5G2I Q [toptechnews.com] (posted at 12:19 PM EST)

I don't know if I entirely believe it, but that's another story....

Run TOR

TOR helps people in oppressive countries freely access information and it needs to grow.
http://tor.eff.org/ [eff.org]

Sigh... flamebait subject line

Editor, PLEASE: "China Reinstates Wikipedia Ban" "It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again." So it is a ban or is it not?

Re:

It's not that I don't have faith but I cannot take such 'reporting' as carved in stone facts when it's still speculation. News report is not a religion, news based on speculation is tabloid.

Yes they have a history of doing that but so did Iraq. And yo

A true reason why it blocked.

All major or minor gateways in china uses a gov-appointed security software installed (sometimes by answering to the gov's requirement), from provincial main cable to a local telcom station, from internet service provider to a router of an unit of a building. From up to down, layer by layer, the software can be everywhere, as a combination of firewall, anti-virus, anti-hacking, anti-porn, word-filtering, user access control and so forth. Many network administrators are quite ok with the software since it provides convinence and secrity to work on.

    The blockage of some websites could be a side effect using that software suit, some websites being blocked occasionaly might because some word trigger(such like some word might be used against The Party) was accidentially fired. Or else, some websites opening occasionally could because some trigger words are removed from the ban list of the software or from the page of the website , in which wikipedia can be the case.

So maybe the control to release a website from ban list isn't in hands of the gov, since that secrity software suit has already been installed in every level of the network and works independently. It's more like a polical-oriented but technical problem now.

Re:

So who in The Party do you work for? That's clearly a pro-Chinese Government piece, clearly written by someone with English as a second language, and appears to be raw propaganda.

My 2 cents

Slashdot ran a story on how the Chinese Wikipedia because so popular so quickly, now maybe I'm stating what some people must believe to be obvious, but maybe the Chinese gov't saw it as a treat to their power. If you think about it something so community b

Why Doesn't China....

Why doesn't China scan Wikipedia for certain keywords and just block certain articles? Don't get me wrong, I think China should be banning no sites, period. However, if China's government insists on blocking Wikipedia due to concerns that articles that touch on their sensitive spots might pop-up, why don't they at least make the rest of Wikipedia available?

Re:

I agree that'd be nice, but -- why would they?

Re:

Because they do that with the rest of the internet anyways, so they could do the exact same thing with Wikipedia.

The Planetary Datalinks

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Re:

You're thinking of Japanese. Chinese has different 'l' and 'r' sounds, and a 'wi' sound too.

Re:

and no, Chinese does not have different ...

Says who? Standard High Chinese ("Mandarin") certainly has differences between r, l, t, d, p, b, g, and k. In detail (I assume you use Pinyin):

r: similar to English r, tip of the tongue rolled upwards, voiced
l: li

Re:

Standard High Chinese ("Mandarin") [...]

Well, it might in the north, and it might not in the south. Even with one unifying language, there is still very little movement within the country, and people learning the provincial language as well as Mandarin.

Re:

Who speaks Chinese? Maybe you can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or one of the other languages that are used to vocalize the Chinese written language, but you don't speak Chinese. Maybe you speak to Chinese (people). Maybe you speak of Chinese (people). Yo

Re:Tick Tock

You are wrong (I think).

Rich, well-fed people do not drive revolutions. On the other hand, if you are hungry, cannot get a job, live on the street, cannot cloth your kids... in short, if you have nothing to lose, then all the freedom and democracy in the world will not abate your unrest.

So the fact that China becomes prosperous is a very good news for the Dear Leaders. And very bad for our military.

Re:Tick Tock

Rich, well-fed people do not drive revolutions.

Huh. I could have sworn most of the founding fathers in the US were wealthy land owners. I suppose you could argue that they weren't the ones DRIVING the revolution, merely the ones leading it. But I've also never heard about the American revolution being started because the majority of people were hungry or un-employed. From what I've been told it was that people were pissed off that England was imposing draconian controls on trade, freedom of expression, etc.

Re:

That and taxes, they didn't like being taxed with no say in the matter. It always comes back to the all powerful dollar... Err pound in this case I guess.

Re:Tick Tock

Huh. I could have sworn most of the founding fathers in the US were wealthy land owners.

The "American Revolution" was a regional separatist movement, which has a bit of a different dynamic than other "revolutions". Still, there is a bit of a point there: both types of revolts are often driven by the at least moderately well-off who see themselves as positioned to be even more well-off if the revolution succeeds, but rely on the plight of the badly off who are easily driven to resent either the physically distant (in the case of regional separatist movements) or socially distant (in other revolutions) ruling class for foot soldiers, though in revolutions other than regional separatist movements, the plight of the poor versus the apparent position of the rich generally has to be very bad, because there is otherwise generally less of a distinct clash of identity between the people revolting and those they are revolting against (though clear differences race, religion, or similar identity between the ruled and the rulers can facilitate in creating a clash that can drive rebellion with less of a visible economic divide.)

Re:

Still, there is a bit of a point there: both types of revolts are often driven by the at least moderately well-off who see themselves as positioned to be even more well-off if the revolution succeeds

Hmm.. I sure haven't extensively studied the founding fa

Re:

Hmm.. I sure haven't extensively studied the founding fathers of the US, but it's my understanding that they were quite driven to establish liberty, and not simply driven by greed or a lust for power.

I didn't say anything about the US founding fathers in

Re:

In any case, I think arguing details of the specific motivations of the American revolution in response to a discussion of the relation of the Chinese situation with general trends it what motivates or produces rebellion is somewhat pointless if it isn't g

Re:

"Rich, well-fed people do not drive revolutions"

Sure they do! Certainly the American revolution was driven by the rich and well fed. More often when the non-desperate drive socail change it is by non-violent means, of course. Of the examples I can think

Re:

Rich, well-fed people do not drive revolutions.

That actually is not true at all. Many, if no most successful revolutions at least have the backing of the middle class. The middle class wields incredible power both in terms of finding intellectual justifi

Re:

Right, if John Kerry and John Edwards had have been elected, China would never have restricted Wikipedia in the first place.