It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship – to put it mildly – on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which exists outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have come down like a tonne of bricks on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger and a number of other sites. And that’s no joke, given that we’re talking about the Great Wall of China here.
Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.
Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown (all agreed to be named in this post). The shut-down is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened in June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected. [Update: News is coming in that the Twitter API has not been affected as badly as the Web site, making API based Twitter applications better placed in China].
Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American writer and consultant in Beijing working with Youku told me via direct message after the system shut down completely using a VPN (which, like proxies, are commonplace in China) that “My only surprise in this matter is that it took ‘em so long.”
Ryan McLaughlin, an ex-pat Amercian writer and web designer/developer based outside Beijing, said [updated:] that VPNs, which many Chinese use to get around the Great Firewall, are not being affected by the shutdown. He also blogs “Undoubtedly the blocks are in an effort to curb online commentary and the dissemination of information about the , which on celebrates its 20th anniversary.”
Mimi Xu, a China/San Francisco based product dev and entrepreneur who Tweets as MissXu, summed it up: “The 3 web services I cant live without – Twitter, Flickr, YouTube – are all blocked in China. Cheers, motherfuckers!”
OMG why do they do that thank god i m not living in china
Why? Because the Chinese govt. simply wants to deny that it ever killed its own people who were demonstrating there a decade ago.
Two decades ago.
Long live china people. Already girl kidnapping happening there as 125m:100f ratio. We will know how the modern age civil war look like.
When did you become an American, Ryan?
F’ing traitor…
Just started a Twitter LiveStream @ http://ftags.com/5MJM “Chinese Censorship Talk” . Please join in.
If you think you are not living in China, look at most of the merchandise you’ve purchased lately. They seem to own us….
Are you sure? Look at most of the merchandise you’ve purchased lately… They seem to own us.
Google blocks news voluntarily in china now just for the reason of pleasing chinese government in order to make their bloody money there.
Boycott google!
Boycott google!
Boycott google!
This control of information is like Orwell’s 1984!
“Nothing happened. ” The Party told the people.
We’re so fed up with the bull shit GFW!
So it seems that Google will be blocking content about the Anniversary voluntarily then?
It sucks that Google chose money over ethics.
Old news: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#China
i’m Chinese,the link you gave is blocked in china.
Good thing Sarah is excited about this country. Live spaces is widely used in china and they shut it down just like that because of some stupid reason.
What’s more amazing, is that (at least for Shanghai Telecom) live.com and now bing.com are the default search engines when a domain name cannot be resolved – and now they both dont work.
I wonder if facebook is going to stay available for long…
So this is why China won’t be the next Silicon Valley.
and this is why Hong Kong is NOT China
Are you sure @TheDarkSide.hk ? HK gov. block Tianenman exile entry into the region. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8080437.stm
How far is china going to go with their GREAT FIREWALL???? before long its going to be a global block for anything that doesn’t fall in a china TLD!!!
The Chinese government just sucks. They block whatever they don’t want Chinese people to see on the Internet.
I hate living in China!!! I hope I can move to the US someday.
I would agree
Why dont you fuckoff right now?
Thats so not fair! That really fits the recent post why China is not becomming the new silicon valley
guess thats one of the reasons! A lot of Video plattforms are banned. Youtube, MySpace Video, the German MyVideo… Annoying!
From Beijing,
Markus
I feel bad for both the people of China who in many cases don’t even know that they’re being blocked but also the establishment of China who seem torn between progressing along side other world leaders or holding on to their past.
Also for those commenters to can’t wait to get out of China but also can’t get to the US, consider Canada. It’s like a slightly colder, friendly version of the US that’s easy to get into. (http://gnb.ca)
China, you are killing the purpose of Internet, so fuck you!
That’s more of Extranet you have, not Internet.
Really, it’s sad, how will we connect, learn from each others if you ban us the communication? assholes …
exactly
China is EVIL!!! I hope Obama does not try to do this next in the Us.
What?! When has Obama espoused anything close to censoring the Internet? It was the previous administration that discouraged all criticism of the government, and accused anyone of questioning the war in Iraq as being “unpatriotic” and “hating America.”
Sorry to go off topic here — I’ll agree that China is evil. That should be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention for the past seventy years. People get blinded by all the money being made over there, forgetting that exploiting one’s own workers can be highly profitable. It’s a police state — a highly profitable one, but still a police state.
Just read yesterday that obama has signed an agreement to tag internet content in order to make censorship easier for china, iran n.korea and others (soon the us also,i’m sure)
Forgive me! I would like to say China gov is evil , or CCP is evil , not China !
The first thing I did was to check this site when I couldn’t open up Twitter website (am in Shanghai now). Techcrunch is really up to the minute news. Cool.
Yeah, just wait till China discovers this article.
I am Chinese, and I am reading this article without proxy. aha
It true, you’d think this page would be blocked because of the link out to wikipedia.
hotmail & *.live.com is also blocked
Fuck GFW, fuck CCP!
As this article, TC may also be blocked soon..
All sites mentioned are indeed blocked. Confirmed from Beijing.
This is quite normal and happens all the time depending on what falls in and out of favor of the government. CNN and BBC were blocked for years and now they are back online. Same with wikipedia as mentioned in the article.
Facebook was blocked for a week or so last year.
I would guess that some will come back online in the coming weeks and months and some will stay shut off for who knows how long.
Just a part of life doing business and/or living in China.
“Just a part of life doing business and/or living in China.”
Are we really that greedy as to condone this type of behavior? And for what?
oops,poor bing,it only exists one day in China…
I hope the Internet and global telecommunication disconnects China on every 4th day of month for no good reasons, to see if the gov. comes up with something and make them to understand the meaning of “inter” connections.
yes, twitter is blocked now (confirmed from Beijing) but i was able to use Uber twitter on my blackberry to access Twitter. In case anyone in China wants to, try apps on your mobile device.
Great Wall of China still blocking shit from entering their country. That’s great!
Blocking Twitter, Facebook and the other shit helps their workers to work, not fucking slack off during work.
That’s why China is the no.1 in the World with highest money supplies and becomes an economic powerhouse soon. They work! They are the World factory.
In Japan there are companies where you can’t sit down for example because there are no chairs (Google Canon and chairs >). And there are companies where they have alarms inside the factory house that when you move too slowly then the alarm will go off. Just because humans wouldn’t waste their time!
Yeah stop your population from thinking and realise they are being treated like shit. Way to go, suppose you thought Hitler was efficient too?
At the end of the day the people are the ones suffering, maybe when the older generations of dickheads die out in China more sensible people come into power
“We don’t have citizens, we have droids.”
Are they also blocked in Hong Kong?
no, absolutely no
Maybe!!!
PeopleSearches.com
maybe it will block more,the day after tomorrow is the pivotal day indeed
is it just me or are there other readers too who’d prefer fewer Twitter news in favour of what else is going on online?
Twitter Search Results on Techcrunch Network: 2,418
I think Twitter has been sufficiently covered by now.
I’m Chinese and I live in China, and it’s true, all are blocked. (and
I’m posting this message thru a proxy to avoid my real IP address from
being spied….)
Yesterday I was betting with my friends that Twitter would be blocked
quite soon because the ‘big event’ is near, and now seems I was right.
But something out of my mind was that I never thought they would block
Hotmail, live, and other surfacely unrelated sites as well..
It’s stupid and unforgivable, but it’s ‘good’. Why? Because what they
have done would HELP and ENCOURAGE people to find out what’s the true
story behind it, due to the attribute all human have: psychological
inversion. The more information you hide, the more interests of
finding out what’s been hide will fire.
When we realize we can’t access youtube, twitter and hotmail, we would
search for the reason. We read tons of articles, and if we can’t open
an article that we are interested in we will try to use the proxy,
until we find the truths that have been hiden for years, SINCE THE
MOMENT WE WERE BORN.
So thank them, not only the block helps us have more interests of
learning more negative information about them while finding out the
reason of block, they also made us hate them more… than ever!
I was thinking that has got to be true. By creating a massive blackhole around the date, aren’t they just enhancing its legacy? I think if I was handling their tian an men strategy I would of used a different tactic then denying and tabooing it. Especially in this day and age of information. Misinformation and noise would of gone a much longer way to distract.
I totally agree with you. It’s true that more and more chinese people will find the the truth of 1989.
I am sorry that’s not the truth around me, for the students didn’t even know twitter ! They just play their stupid games ! Twitter or flickr or anything else cannot affect them if the games still exist! People who know the Jun 4 knows it , who don’t still don’t know ! What a pity ! I think you cannot accept the truth, neither can I !
You are not chinese,you do not love your motherland
The true motherland is the people, not the oppressing government that is in the motherland.
I have a rich Chinese friend here in the states, she recently came here and has a picture of mao in her living room. I think she too is brain washed.
Twitter might be blocked in China. but you can still have access to basic Twitter features via email with Topify.com to manage your followers and send/answer Direct Messages
Blocking a site today does not make sense. A service is distributed and there is always a way to make it work
Am i the only one twittering from China??? woohoooo! thanks to twitterGadget!! we lurve ya!!!
Talking about GFW.. haven’t had access to blogger for a long while. do something Google!!
i wonder why Chinese gov likes doing this to its own citizens, don’t they have some sort of public understanding or wat?
it sucks that things like this happen, specially for the 1.5billion Chinese ppl who would never get to know the things that the entire world uses, except the ‘made in china’ products.
also heard that the gov spies on ppl who uses any non Chinese service, that rly gotta piss u off if ur a Chinese citizen, gl to all my Chinese brothers!
can you still tweet from mobile phones?
And can’t visit my flickr account any more, fu*k gfw!
Tragic. Despite the developments in democracy across the world, China continues as a Dictatorship. How undermining to the intelligence of a nation.
One thing is for sure. This shows the naivety (and deep seated ignorance) of the Chinese Government. The power of information and the internet will prevail. The chinese government should be careful that this does not cause huge civil unrest. This will only provoke an outcry. The stability of chinese government is surely slipping. It’s all downhill from here.
better treat these folks with kid gloves – they own more of our debt than anyone – just look how Geitner changed his tune.
Mike, thank u for your report!
F the Great Wall of China!
Mike, thank u for your report!
F the Great Firewall of China!
Only when I read news like this I tend to realize the power of democracy and freedom. Can we think of this situation like this in US or any other countries?
Twitter still available in China with Seesmic Desktop manual trackback
http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2009/06/twitter-still-available-in-chine-with-seesmic-desktop.html
Fuck GFW, fuck CCP!
you sure you are good at fuck, chinaman?
Everybody needs to calm the f*** down. Certain sites are always blocked ahead of June 4th, has been every year. When June 5th rolls around the sites are unblocked again. Interestingly though, the tiananmen wiki links and the keyword aren’t blocked, very strange censoring.
techcrunch gfwed ing….
b4 TC getting ban, best regard from cn, few cn ppl know ab ti.anan.men. a cnese
youtube has been blocked since the tibetan “beating” video was posted.
it was so “obviously a fake, made up of a montage of several other unrelated videos”. you can see that by the fact that is was filmed with one continuous shot.
hehehe the local tagline of it being a fake was hilarious!!!
as it is, we periodically get blocked. 2 years ago hotmail and yahoo were blocked at christmas time. making it hard for us to communicate wit our relatives back home.
they only lose more face with each increased effort to save face… sad part is… the rest of the world doesn’t play their saving face game. so they don’t realize that by never admitting what is obviously true, just makes them look stupid in everyone else’s eyes…
china sucks! the government blocks everything… they dont let you do anything… no one should do business in china! it is like help the government suppress its own people…
wait… why do i see more foreigners in china?? the propaganda must have spread!! evil chinese!!!
we must protest anyone that does any kind of business with China!!!
must blame on the a a a a a alco… i mean chinese government!!
i read on the internet… i must know alot kekekkekek
3q3q
So twitter got blocked, big deal…..geez
Agree it’s not a big deal that TWITTER itself is blocked, but like so many things in life it’s the principle.
We live in an information age. Countries that prevent access to information widely available elsewhere do a disservice to their people. It would be like closing libraries or burning books in earlier times. In addition to the lack of an exchange of ideas, there are also economic implications. A Western advertiser may choose not to purchase ad space on a website that may be blocked due to the unannounced whims of local regulators. Advertisers pull out, jobs are lost, and the marketplace looks unrealiable to everyone.
As an American living in China, I find the thing I miss most from home is the First Amendment. I was surprised but not shocked to discover upon arrival that censorship like this is extremely upsetting ideologically to me.
So yes, who cares about not knowing that Sally just had a sandwich and OMG it was soooo goood! It’s the principle of it all that’s troubling.
First TC comment – finally got me.
I go to China on business from the US every month. Yes the Chinese government is repressive – but I have to tell you that most Americans have an inaccurate view of life in China – including you, BeijingDude – even if you live in Beijing.
I have an apartment in Shenzhen – and I gotta tell you – these guys have many more freedoms than we do in the US – not to mention the fact that they aren’t wasting all their wealth on illegal wars around the globe.
I am an American – but unlike many of you, I have actually been to these countries and spent time with the populace. Let me just say, don’t believe everything you read in the western media. It is easy to judge other cultures based on our standards – but guess what? When they judge us, we don’t exactly come out smelling like roses. I am certainly not condoning any of the attrocities that their government perpetrates on its people, but as they say, those who live in glass houses….
oh shit… way to take oppression to the nxt level. Good Game China….
i’m glad i dont live in china. i’d have to move. this censorship is going a lot overboard.
Yesterday, in response to Sarah Lacy’s article, I posted the following response:
“Good timing with this article. The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is this Thursday. I went to China in 1986, but I am in no rush to go back. I’d personally prefer not to send my money to the Chinese government and support their autocratic rule…. I wonder if the TechCrunch site is blocked by the Great Firewall of China.”
It generated a bit of a discussion, particularly from Chinese people who noted that I wasn’t missed and that everything would be OK if we just didn’t worry about politics, had a red bull, and went back to coding.
http://tinyurl.com/o5rlcj
If we ignore the actions of governments, both ours and others, we basically are conceding their right to do anything they please. In this case, the Chinese government has taken the [temporary?] step of blocking its resident citizens from some of the most lively non-Chinese sites. My comments are not just limited to China. I have stopped going to the UK, and I have spent a fair amount of time and money working against the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld war criminals, and in support of the current US administration.
I’d love to visit Xian and see Guilin, as well as the transformed Shanghai and Beijing, but I’ll just wait and see what happens. In the meantime, the latest round of blocked web sites just reinforces what I said yesterday.
I do not understand. What makes the Chinese gov. think they are bigger than the internet? The average chinese citizen does not care what the gov. is doing, as long as he/she are unaffected. I lived in China 2 years. It is not EVIL! Neither are its people. Basing opinions of a nation, by what the gov. does is why so many hate the USA. I wonder how U.S. citizens hated the Bush administration, and felt they were blamed for G.W.
EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD NOTHING TO DO, WITH HIS POLICIES, OR HIS BEHAVIOR.
Why the hell the emailbox blocked? Deadly hatred is filling my heart. What else is there for our Chinese people if not inexpressable hatred toward Chinese government?
If the gov thinks this blockade would help prolong its rule, it would be a huge huge mistake.
all of you talking about China can shove it up your ass, you hyprocites are the biggest supporters of human rights abuse . Pretending to have fake freedoms in your countries when your really under control under the gun. China and Russia will fight you all the way and put you in Hell, your home. We won most gold medals including boxing and weight lifting, so if you think about easily defeating us, go ahead and bring it on. Sorryasss losers westerners, your countries are in daily decline and people of color get killed there. Unless they kiss ass of whites, like some of you fake chinese and others are doing here. China and Russia United.
You are right!,those fake chinese are disgrace to us true Chinese.
Yes… we are fake Chinese, and we hate to be Chinese. We hate for being born in this country, but there is nothing we can do, except complaining all around after we found out our goverment su*ks…deep!
Now GO and search “Twitter 被封” by yourself and read all those articles written by Chinese themselves and then tell all those angers ‘you are a fake Chinese’ too!
Tragic. The majority population of this country are brain washed, they think all people (including locals) telling negative words about the gov., are rantankerous, or ‘been DEEPLY hurted by western information’…
china is run by slant eyed n.i.g.g.e.r.s.
You will be blocked soon!
I really needed access to my email.s today – was awaiting important news from prospective employers. Some comments suggesting that the rest of the world is democratic, and so beyond reproach astonish me.
America this week announced the power to shut down the internet. Why have the power if you don’t plan to use it? Well thought answers please.
Global governance implies global collusion. This kind of thing will begin to happen elsewhere very soon. Some may laugh at my comment. Do some research on the beloved internet before you need thumb scans to access it！
p.s Thumb scanning access to computers already exists – and will be employed for accessing the internet2. Research it – please!