Reuters: China still blocking some Google links

China is once again allowing its citizens to use the popular search engine Google, but is still blocking Internet users from content it deems politically taboo as part of a media crackdown ahead of November's pivotal Communist Party congress.

Another search engine, California-based AltaVista, remained blocked on Friday, and the Chinese government appeared to be still barring Google searches on topics it regards as sensitive.

A representative of Google, which is also based in California, said the company had heard from Chinese users that they were again able to access its site 10 days after Beijing blocked it.

But on Friday Chinese surfers could not open Web links appearing under sensitive search topics such as Tibet, Chinese democracy activists, President Jiang Zemin or his likely successor, Hu Jintao.

Searches for the outlawed spiritual movement Falun Gong have been blocked altogether ahead of the Nov. 8 congress at which Jiang is expected to begin handing over power to a new generation of leaders. Some people who tried searches for Falun Gong also found their service on Google--popular among China's 45 million Internet users for its ability to conduct Chinese-language searches--disabled briefly.

Analysts said China, under criticism from its millions of Google users and of rights groups abroad, was using software to sift Google material entering China through its Internet gateways and was no longer blocking Google and routing users to local sites.

"Rather than stopping things going out, they've switched to filtering things coming back in," said Duncan Clark, head of Beijing-based tech consultancy BDA China. "It might not be completely consistent."

Measures like the all-out block on Falun Gong, which has been accused of threatening Communist Party rule, were a clue to leaders' sensitivities ahead of the congress, Clark said.

"It's to some extent a gauge of how the winds are blowing," he said.

But it remained unclear how long China could continue its selective censoring of Google, given the big costs in staffing and bandwidth to ensure nationwide compliance.

"We may be talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year," said Clark.

The filtering of Google may also reflect increasing Internet surveillance in China, which has detained people for posting material on democracy and the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.

In March, about 130 major Web portals operating in China took a government-issued self-censorship pledge to promote healthy competition and observe the ban on a familiar list of touchy topics. Rights groups and advocates of free speech called it a step backward for freedom of expression, and some criticized the signatories--said to include Yahoo.

China also restricts access to several foreign news sites and often forces domestic sites to remove content deemed unacceptable.