July 19, 2006 09:30 | WebTech

Here, try this.

Give this a try, let me know what you get.

First, let's search Baidu, one of the major chinese search engines, for "chocolate".

Yum yum

Ok now let's try... "Tianamen massacre", written in western script.

Still works.

Ok now try this.

Woops! You'll likely get a web-browser generated error message saying something like "Connection interrupted" or some such.

Hit your browser's back button and reload that chocolate query. Doesn't work either does it?

Bravo. You've just been temporarily blacklisted by the Great Chinese Internet Censorship Program for searching for politically subversive terms ("Tianamen massacre" in chinese).

(Helping out Rebecca for her HRWi report. We also see this stuff daily in the OpenNet Initiative list.)

Comments

Well, I did not have the problem. I got a bunch of stuff in chinese on the try "this" query.


Very interesting. I am at home now (different ISP from at the office) and I too now get through. Strangeness...