China 'blocks' main Google site (BBC)

Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said.

Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google's international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.

But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected.

The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.
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"Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China," {Reporters Without Borders} said.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5055170.stm

The money is too damn good for the corporate elements in America to realize they're doing business with the same men who slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of student protesters in 1989 like this guy:



And they're still imprisoning and killing people who dare to question the Communist Party's authority.

Every time the Chinese government has some big conference or party shindig, the Internet gets censored in some way. So does the phone system, newspapers, tv, radio - in short, all media. The police crackdown on petty criminals, the hospitals start ramming patients through like an assemblyline, factories go into frantic overproduction.

The reason for all this increased activity is the same: the ministers responsible for running the economy don't want to open themselve to criticism for not doing their jobs. Everything that happens in the run-up to a Party Conference is done to fortify ministers against attacks from other ministers who want to run their departments.

After the big event, everyone goes back to sleep until the next one. Google will be back up the day after the upcoming summit, and will disappear about a month before the next one. T'was ever thus in the People's Republic.

http://google.cn/search?q=site:democraticunderground.com

That's sloppy!

...my browser went straight to google.com instead of google.cn. Other international google sites (.uk, .fr etc.) work correctly, it just seems to be the .cn site that's redirected.

Also, unless the user is sitting in China (or using a Chinese ISP), they won't see what a China-based user will see. Any block on sites like DU will operate on the Chinese DNS servers and not be visible to external users.