Daily Telegraph: Telegraph website blocked in Chinese U-turn on reform.

By Damien McElroy.
(06/18/2002)

CHINA appears to have blocked access to The Daily Telegraph website in a setback to those reformers in the Communist regime who have fought for the removal of controls to prevent 35 million internet surfers reading foreign newspapers online.

The website telegraph.co.uk joins the BBC as the most prominent news site now barred from the Chinese public. Officials of the internet security office of the Ministry of Information Industry refused yesterday to give any reason for blocking the site.

Beijing was applauded for adopting a more liberal attitude as recently as last month when it lifted controls on a number of American newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Political analysts saw the move as a sign that modernises in the Communist Party were being courted in the run-up to the party congress in September when a new generation of Chinese leaders will be chosen. Now it appears that the geriatric politburo that has run China since 1989 has returned to form, using censorship to stop access to information it believes to be damaging to the system.

Although Beijing has tolerated rapid growth in subscribers to the internet, the leadership has been determined to insulate surfers from newspapers which report the news that the Propaganda Ministry has purged from the domestic media. The decision to block or unblock sites is highly political and is taken at the very top of the Chinese leadership. When editors of the New York Times asked President Jiang Zemin to justify the ban on its website last summer, the Chinese leader stonewalled, but within days controls denying access to the New York Times were lifted.

Chinese internet users are prevented from downloading hundreds of sites run by human rights groups, Falun Gong followers and political dissidents as well as official sites of the Taiwan government and the exiled Tibetan administration.

The Chinese firewall has been built with software developed in America.

Selling and installing the latest technology is a lucrative source of business for software companies. A technology expert in Beijing said: "Some organisations have made some very serious money here by working with the Chinese on controlling the flow of information."