Friday, October 19, 2007
As China’s Communist leaders convene in Beijing for their five-yearly National Congress, it appears state internet censors have blocked access to the online video site YouTube. As of Wednesday night in Shanghai, an attempt to connect to YouTube returns an all too familiar page for Web users in China, a blank page notifying the user that the browser cannot make a connection to the site. Web surfers in China may remember this page from such blocked sites as BBC News or Wikipedia.Historically, the Chinese government engages in mass internet censorship during the Communist Party Congress and the yearly National People’s Congress. The National Congress of the Communist Party of China began in Beijing on October 15th and oversees the appointment of new Party leadership and changing party roles over the next five years. As a symbolic display of Party strength and a measure to avoid distractions, China’s Information Ministry will commonly block access to controversial Chinese websites and restrict television and radio content.The English-language media blog Danwei described a similar situation regarding YouTube in Beijing. Web users elsewhere in mainland China have verified the site is blocked and the definitive Great Firewall of China site, which tests URLs for access blockage in mainland China confirms that www.youtube.com is indeed blocked. No blockages have been reported in Hong Kong.YouTube, the comprehensive open-source video site owned by Google, typifies media that torments China’s censors. Essentially, this means users are free to upload video content to YouTube with minimal restrictions and are able to view all of the site’s content without filtering. As the tech-minded Little Red Blog pointed out in a July 2006 post on video-sharing in China, "YouTube does monitor uploads for IPR violations and sexually explicit content (with mixed success) but it’s probably not paying much attention to things that would annoy Chinese Government censors…The Chinese Government is not, by and large, a fan of unregulated user-generated content or search. In fairness, many of us have been wondering the same thing about Flickr for some time, but it’s still accessible here." An interesting footnote: Flickr was blocked in China 10 months later.As with every internet censorship measure in mainland China, it is a guessing game as to when, if ever, access to YouTube will resume. The 17th National Congress of the Communist Party concludes on Saturday though officials have already named President Hu Jintao China’s "paramount leader" until 2012. With an apparent block and numerous emerging Chinese video-sharing pages, it remains to be seen whether YouTube will endure as China’s paramount video site.
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