Following up on an earlier Boing Boing post about Chinese authorities blocking news of a protest crackdown in which as many as 20 people died, here's a snip from a story by Howard French in the NYT:
Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative. But controls like these have spurred a lively commentary among China's fast-growing blogging community.
"The domestic news blocking system is really interesting," wrote one blogger. "I heard something happened in Shanwei and wanted to find out whether it was true or just the invention of a few people. So I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn't do any searches." Baidu is one of the country's leading search engines.
"I don't dare to talk," another blogger wrote. "There are sensitive words everywhere – our motherland is so sensitive. China's body is covered with sensitive zones."
While numerous bloggers took the chance of discussing the incident on their Web sites, they found that their remarks were blocked or rapidly expunged, as the government knocked out comments it found offensive or above its low threshold. Some Internet users had trouble calling up major Western news sites, although those were not universally blocked.
