TODAYonline | World | China | More bricks added to Great Firewall of China

TODAYonline | World | China | More bricks added to Great Firewall of China:

Tightening of access to sites like YouTube could be tied to recent leadership change

04:45 AM Dec 24, 2012

HONG KONG - China appears to have reinforced its Internet firewall in recent days, blocking some of the leading services that allow people on the mainland to access forbidden sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

International business transactions also are being affected, Internet analysts said. At least three foreign companies - Astrill, WiTopia and StrongVPN - have apologised to customers whose virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been slowed or disabled. VPNs are used to circumvent the Communist government's firewall. The companies, meanwhile, were suggesting some work-arounds.

The Global Times daily, which is affiliated with the Communist Party, acknowledged the firewall had been "upgraded", but it also warned that foreign providers of VPN services were operating illegally.

The Chinese government blocks online searches of politically sensitive terms, smothers embarrassing news events, blocks online messages from dissidents and deletes any microblog posts that it dislikes.

The Great Firewall of China, as it is known, also blocks countless websites that are available to users elsewhere around the world - from pornography sites to news reporting, political activism and religious proselytising. Users on the mainland thus have to use VPNs to reach the banned sites.

Mr Liu Xiao Ming, the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, told the BBC on Friday that there was "a misconception about the Internet and development in China".

"In fact, the Chinese are very much open in terms of the Internet," he said, quoted in an article in The South China Morning Post. "In fact, we have the most number of Internet users in China today."

An estimated 600 million Chinese have access to the Internet.

Foreign businesses also use VPNs not only to safeguard their transactions but also to keep government censors and rival companies from seeing their corporate communications.

Global Times quoted an anonymous executive at a foreign technology company operating in China who said the lack of a VPN would damage the firm's operations.

Mr Josh Ong, China editor of the tech monitoring site The Next Web, said in an interview with the Voice of America that international companies were reporting disruptions in their corporate VPN services.

"A lot of companies have a general policy that they must use their own proxy network in order to transfer data, especially into and out of China," Mr Ong said.

"So you are looking at banks or e-commerce companies, anyone who is transferring very sensitive information, a lot of them use corporate VPNs," he said.

Mr Ong suggested that the tightening of the firewall could be tied to the recent leadership change in the Communist Party.

"It is certainly possible that some of it is just a general flexing of might, kind of coming in with a strong arm to really show who's in control," he said.

"But there is definitely something intentional happening when these VPN services are being restricted."

Ms Barbara Demick, The Los Angeles Times' Bureau Chief in Beijing, offered this cautionary tweet: "Note to Chinese censors: If you pull our VPNs, main Asia news bureaus will have to move to Tokyo. Not good for China." THE NEW YORK TIMES