The Olympic Unblocking

[roddy]

According to the Guardian the BBC's Chinese language service is now unblocked. The BBC themselves don't appear to be reporting this.

Anyone care to confirm this? What about Chinese Wiki?

[liuzhou]

Yes, both have been open for a couple of days now and the BBC did report it.

"The BBC's Chinese-language website appeared to be unblocked on Thursday."

Here

[adrianlondon]

On Wednesday the TV stations here in Europe spent most of their news minutes talking about blocked websites in China and how they weren't living up to their Olympic promise of allowing unrestricted access to the journalists.

The Chinese govt countered that they really only agreed to allow unrestricted access to sites related to Olympic information so the journalists could do their job ;) So CNN and the BBC, which show live coverage from the journalist compound in Beijing, basically showed us loads of IE7 "page not found" errors as if to prove a point.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7532797.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7532338.stm

Then yesterday (or Thursday evening) it was reported that many web pages (Chinese language BBC pages for example) were unblocked. However, that's being reported much more quietly as headlines like "Web page accessible in Beijing" doesn't generate so much income.

Although I am totally against internet censorship, and think Amnesty International pages definitely shouldn't be blocked (hiding from them is tantamount to saying "yup, guilty, you got me"), Western Olympic journalists don't really need to access pages on Tibettan independence for example. The journalists not on the China jolly and still working back in the main office can access those. They've got nothing else to do right now ;)

[liuzhou]

Isn't it strange they can suddenly open sites they have always said weren't blocked, but only had technical problems?

Or are they just a bunch of liars.

Edited August 2, 2008 at 11:42 AM by liuzhou