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."

Comments

Reflects the Politics in Beijing

[ackthpt]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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 conservatives. The liberals would be supporters of democracy.

The words are also used differently in Europe. And once upon a time in the USA, liberals were supporters of democracy and a free market... it's different now. The terms are not bound to any specific ideology.

Re:Reflects the Politics in Beijing

[anaesthetica]

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 followed by the Anti-Rightist Movement. 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.

Wikinews link

[Rob T Firefly]

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

Re:You like flied lice?

[Gregory Cox]

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

Accordign to Google.....

[8127972]

They haven't blocked it:

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

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

Re:Searching vs typing in URL?

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Run TOR

[Mantus]

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

Re:You like flied lice?

[Anonymous Coward]

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). You don't speak Chinese because that's not the right noun to use to specify the spoken language. OTOH if you do speak ALL of the Chinese languages, you're still wrong because they're not at all similar and I really doubt ri vs. li exists in all of them. I know what you are saying about ri vs. li in Mandarin.

Perhaps the way for people to think about this (in a kinda backwards way) is that you can transcribe spoken English into written American English, written Queen's English, or l33t, but they're definitely different. Or maybe EBCDIC vs. ASCII -- both can be used to record a work of Shakespeare, but yeah they're different.

A true reason why it blocked.

[imkow]

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:You like flied lice?

[Knuckles]

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: like in land or lung

t: like english t, tip of the tongue touches back side of upper front teeth, but strongly aspirated with audible breath following the sound
d: like t but not aspirated; short

p: like english p, but strongly aspirated with audible breath following the sound
b: like p, but not aspirated; short

g: similar to english g; not aspirated, not voiced
k: strongly aspirated with audible breath following the sound; speak nearly like kh