With the glare of the Olympic spotlight gone, China has resumed blocking access to the Internet sites of some foreign media, reversing itself on earlier promises to expand press freedom as part of its bid to win the games, human rights groups and press advocates said.
The Chinese-language Web sites of the BBC and Voice of America, along with the Hong Kong-based media Ming Pao and Asiaweek, are among the sites that have been inaccessible since early this month, the press rights group Reporters Without Borders said.
“Right now, the authorities are gradually rolling back all the progress made in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic games, when even foreign Web sites in Mandarin were made accessible. The pretense of liberalization is now over,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday, as it urged China to unblock the sites.
Earlier this week, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超) defended China’s right to censor Web sites that have material deemed illegal by the government, saying that other countries regulate their Internet usage too.
During the Summer Games held in August, China allowed access to long-barred Web sites such as the BBC site and Human Rights Watch after an outcry from foreign reporters who complained that Beijing was failing to live up to its pledges of greater media freedom.
The fact that China has now chosen to re-block those sites is not so surprising, said Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalism professor who teaches about media and the Internet at the University of Hong Kong.
“I don’t think very many people expected to see the Olympics herald a whole new era in China, at least not as far as politics and media,” she said.
MacKinnon noted that the policing of the Internet in China, which has the most online users in the world with more than 250 million, swings between phases of looser monitoring and then tighter regulation.
“There were a lot of foreigners running around covering the Olympics. It made sense to unblock at that time,” she said.
Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said Beijing is also taking advantage of the fact that the world’s attention has shifted away from China after the Olympics.
“It’s easier to suppress dissent when you don’t have 10,000 journalists in town,” he said.
Bequelin said he believed that the Internet restrictions were part of a larger attempt at political control during a period of uncertainty and potential instability for the government. China is facing a serious economic downturn this year, and social unrest has increased.
“I think we’re heading toward a sensitive period for the leadership,” he said. “Information control is the basic tool of political control in China.”
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