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China blocks Tibetan protest info online

TimePublished on Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 15:52, Updated at Thu, Mar 20, 2008 in World section

BLOCKED PATH: Beijing has built a 'great firewall of China', which blocks people from getting information even from Google.

BLOCKED PATH: Beijing has built a "great firewall of China", which blocks people from getting information even from Google.


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Hong Kong: China insists its security forces have Tibet under control — as dramatic video emerges of Friday's deadly demonstrations in Lhasa.

An Australian tourist captured these images of Anti-Beijing protesters attacking Chinese businesses and setting them on fire. The tape also shows police moving in to restore order.

Meanwhile, China is shutting down information in cyberspace, leaving its citizens in the dark about what's been happening in Tibet.

As Beijing fights to end Tibetan protests, it's also battling to control the flow of images and information to the millions of Internet users inside China.

If one tries to search "free Tibet" on Google in China — a page of search results will appear, but on clicking on one of the links — an error message appears.

A search for "Tibet" on CNN.com ends in the same error message, and on Youtube one can't even access the main page.

Such measures aren't unusual — China often presses the censor button, but a US-based group that monitors Chinese digital media says this time, things seem different.

Xiao Qiang of the Berkeley China Internet Project says, “The scale of the control at the national gateway level and inside China is far more intense than anything I have seen before.”

Beijing has built something of a "great firewall of China" — a complex system of monitoring and filtering of sensitive keywords.

Popular web sites like Sohu and Sina offer reports on the protests, but as dictated by China's official Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua has been reporting a significantly lower death toll than Tibetan exile groups, along with the government's allegations that the Dalai Lama is behind the violence.

The university students and Internet users seemed to echo the government's official version of events.

The Dalai Lama has denied orchestrating the protests and says he has never advocated violence, but China's "great firewall" is not perfect, as creative Internet users sidestep the censors by among other things — misspelling words that have been filtered.

For example: A website may not allow one to post a comment with "Da Lai," the Chinese words for the Dalai Lama, but type in the letters "D-L" and you get information about the Dalai Lama.

China's chat rooms — which are subject to censorship, meanwhile are busy hosting some reaction to the unrest.

One participant on a popular site writes, “I’m 100 per cent supportive of the government oppression of the riot.

But also on the same site another comment says, "The thing that angers me most is that the party is blocking out information again on this — it's helplessly dumb."

China meanwhile is working to restrict access on the information superhighway, while some users try to work around the roadblocks.

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