China has blocked access to more than 19,000 Web sites focusing on issues ranging from health and environment, to entertainment and politics, a new research study has said.
The authors of the report -- Jonathan Zittrain, an assistant professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at the Harvard Law School, and Ben Edelman, a technology analyst and student there -- checked more than 200,000 sites from March to November 2002, through Internet access in China.
" This report is intended as a milepost, part of an ongoing empirical investigation documenting filtering levels and methods over time," said the authors of the study -- "Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China."
The authors documented thousands of sites rendered inaccessible with the help of common and longstanding filtering practices. The report found the sites through connections to the Internet by telephone dial-up link and through proxy servers in China.
The report found that 19,032 web sites were inaccessible from China but were easy to access from the United States. Among the sites blocked were those operated by world governments, nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions and sites on issues such as health, entertainment and politics.
The blocked sites included OneWorld, an international developmental news site, the Asian American Baptist Church, the American Cancer Society, the Voice of America, a U.S. media channel, and a United Nations daily news and current events Web site. Others blocked included the Web sites of U.S. educational institutions, such as Caltech, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia.
The authors could not connect to Web sites related to democracy and human rights in China. Forty of the 100 sites that Google, a search engine, tracked in response to the authors' search for "democracy China" were blocked.
Among the other blocked sites were human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Hong Kong Voice of Democracy and the Direct Democracy Center. Dozens of sites on the Falun Gong and Falun Dafa, religious cults banned in China, were also found to be blocked.
"The blocking of sites indicates that Internet is becoming a very powerful medium for accessing information," said Kanti Kumar, editor of the Digital Opportunity Channel, a OneWorld portal. "It's significant that China is not just blocking politically sensitive sites but is also blocking access to basic information about developments across the world, to keep citizens ignorant," he said.
The report said that its data indicated that Chinese authorities were keeping a regular watch on the Web sites. "...it appears that the set of sites blocked in China is by no means static: whoever maintains the lists is actively updating them, and certain general-interest high-profile sites whose content changes frequently appear to be blocked and unblocked as those changes are evaluated," the report said.
The authors concluded that the Chinese government maintained "an active interest in preventing users from viewing certain Web content, both sexually explicit and non-sexually explicit."
Internet use has been expanding in China in the last few years. The report said that an estimated 11 million people were connected to the Internet in the Asian nation. In recent months, people have been detained or jailed in China for using the Internet for advocating democracy in the one-party ruled nation.
"With this project we seek to document and analyze a large number of Web pages blocked by various types of filtering regimes, and ultimately create a distributed tool enabling Internet users worldwide to gather and relay such data from their respective locations on the Internet," the authors said. "We can thus start to assemble a picture not of a single hypothetical World Wide Web comprising all pages currently served upon it, but rather a mosaic of webs as viewed from respective locations, each bearing its own limitations on access."