This morning Google's site was again accessible, with no explanation. But some content linked to the site remained blocked -- for example, Tibetan independence sites. AltaVista also still appeared to be blocked.
China's broadening censorship highlights the central tension underlying its transition from a closed and centrally planned economy to one where market forces hold sway: The Communist Party remains committed to maintaining its monopolistic grip on political power by controlling what Chinese people see and read, but it also wants private investors to take over the state's role as the engine of economic growth. That requires that investors be given free access to information and modern communications.
China's government has sought to serve these conflicting aims by allowing the Internet to spread while filtering out content it views as a threat. The government began blocking Google early this month and AltaVista this week.
More than 45 million Chinese use the Internet. The government often blocks access to Western news sites such as the New York Times, The Washington Post and the British Broadcasting Corp. But China traditionally has not interfered with search engines, the most widely used tools for finding information on the Web.
Recently, however, the government discovered that the search sites amount to a gap in its armor. China's Internet users have been able to link through Google to sites operated by the Falun Gong [spiritual] group, which the government has banned as a [slanderous term omitted], as well as those run by advocates for Tibetan independence. Google is a particularly effective bridge to such content because it has an excellent Chinese-language search capacity.
At a news conference last week in Beijing, an official with China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kong Quan, declined to comment specifically on the Google case, but he acknowledged that the government is concerned about "harmful things on the Internet" and said that "this information should not be allowed to pass freely."
A Google Inc. spokesman said the company was notified by its users that its site was being blocked. "We are currently working with Chinese authorities to resolve this issue," Google said in a statement.
AltaVista Co. spokeswoman Joanne Hartzell said the company is not sure its site is being blocked. "We haven't received any official notification from the Chinese government," she said. AltaVista has contacted the Chinese consulate in San Francisco but has not heard back. The company has been directing users in China to an alternate address for its search service, Raging.com, which is still accessible.
According to sources with knowledge of the decision, China's leaders opted to block Google indefinitely after discovering that a search using the name of China's president, Jiang Zemin, yields a trove of articles from Chinese-language newspapers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and the United States that are not allowed to circulate here. Many of the articles explore the intrigue surrounding the upcoming national Congress of the Communist Party, at which Jiang is expected to begin the process of turning power over to a new generation of leadership.
"The amount of information that was available via Google was shocking to the leadership," one source said.
Though China has thus far proven adept at courting investment and opening its economy while still maintaining strictures on information, its move against search engines has heightened the conflict. Some analysts say it could hurt China as a climate for investment. Barring access to certain news sites inconveniences some people, but news can still be found elsewhere. Google, on the other hand, is widely hailed as irreplaceable, by far the best means of taming the Internet's gusher of data.
"China is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage," said Joel T. Kotkin, a global technology expert at Pepperdine University's Davenport Institute for Public Policy. He noted that China is increasingly encouraging a returning diaspora of Western-educated citizens to build new, innovative businesses that can replace China's failing state enterprises -- people such as David Y. Chen.
Chen, 34, was born in China and has studied and worked in Australia, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He is the president of Harcourt Cos., a Shanghai-based holding company that has invested about $20 million in telecommunications, software and Internet ventures here over the past two years. Chen complained that the lack of access to Google is impeding his ability to find new investments.
"This kind of thing should not happen," he said. "Information is so important in today's business. We believe in China's economic growth, and that's why we're still here, but it's very important for us to be able to access good information."
When China started blocking Google, typing in the site's address generally produced an error message, as if the page did not exist. Last weekend, China's censors implemented a new technique: Those seeking Google's page were diverted -- "hijacked," in the parlance of the World Wide Web -- to different search sites based in China.
In Beijing and Shanghai, some Google seekers have been diverted to a search site run by Beijing University, which posted a message denying responsibility. Others were taken to Baidu.com, a Chinese-language Google competitor backed by International Data Group, the American-based media giant.
The hijacking has fueled speculation that traditional concerns about banning sensitive material are being creatively employed as a lever in a modern-day competition for market share. The extra traffic on the Chinese search engines will boost ad revenue. Baidu's marketing director, Bi Sheng, said traffic to his site has increased noticeably, though he said the company has no knowledge of how the redirection from Google occurred.
But most analysts think the search engine blocking is simply a case of China's leaders asserting their grip. "The Chinese government is really insecure about letting people use infrastructure that they don't control," said Will Foster of Arizona State University, an expert on Chinese Internet use.
"Basically, they want Chinese people to use Chinese search engines instead of Google," he said. "The party has decided that the Internet is the path to prosperity -- it just needs to be safeguarded. They're trying to basically make people feel that the government is watching, to make sure that people don't use the Net for discourse that involves criticizing the government."
China's control over the flow of information owes much to the unique architecture of its computer networks. The Internet is a global web of interlinked computers that swap information, but China's government has limited the places where its networks can link to those in other countries. Only nine such networks are allowed to connect via satellite and undersea cables to the computer systems of the rest of the planet. The rest of China's Internet service providers are dependent on buying wholesale links from one of these giants.
Sixty to 80 percent of China's Internet traffic is carried by just one of these large players: ChinaNet, which is operated by the state telephone company, China Telecom. When China's content minders want to shut down access to something, they can easily use one of these major choke points. They simply program the routers -- which function something like railroad switches -- to reject data from certain sites.
"They are as capable of flipping a switch and turning off those sites as you are capable of flipping a switch on your Windows desktop and shutting off a program," said Ben Edelman, a Harvard University law student who has designed a program to tell which sites are being blocked in China.
In the past two years, China's methods of combating unwanted content have grown markedly more sophisticated, experts say. Much like Carnivore, the controversial FBI program that sifts through millions of e-mails to search for key words, China has been implementing new programs that can block articles that mention "Tibet" or "Falun Gong" but allow access to the rest of the site that holds them. The government appeared to use that approach to Google's site this morning. Such programs also can monitor e-mail.
Experts say these systems employ routers made by Cisco Systems Inc. and a range of software, some purchased off the shelf from major Western companies and some developed here.
"While it may be our equipment, there's a range of functions on how it can be implemented, and that's up to the customer," said Cisco spokeswoman Melissa Kendrick. "The products that Cisco Systems sells in China are the same that Cisco sells worldwide." She added that none of the company's products is built or designed specifically for the Chinese government, nor is Cisco the lone supplier.
China also has used the appeal of its potentially enormous market to persuade Western companies to censor their own content in exchange for the government's blessing to operate here.
Yahoo Inc. built its brand name by portraying itself as a liberating force. In an address at the National Press Club in April 2000, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang referred to China as "a governmental system that is very incongruent to the Internet," while offering hopes that expanding trade would allow "the best benefits of the Internet" to take root. This year, in March, Yahoo's affiliate in China signed an agreement to voluntarily block access to certain sites.
AltaVista chief executive James Barnett said his company is unlikely to follow that route.
"There's a business issue here, but there's a much more important and broader issue as well," he said. "Censorship just flies in the face of everything we're about as a company. We're about open access to information."
Musgrove reported from Washington. Special correspondent Wang Ting in Shanghai contributed to this report.
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